MARGHERITA SARACENO, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca - Department of Statistics, Bocconi University - Centre for Research on Monetary and Financial Economics
Email: margherita.saraceno@unimib.it

This paper presents a simple model of disputes resolution both from a macro-perspective (social planner's problem) and from a micro-perspective (parties' choice). Furthermore, it analyzes the effects of a number of policies on: a) victim's access to justice, b) parties' choice between settlement and litigation, c) social costs of disputes resolution. Our research extends the existing literature by showing that reducing litigation rate is not always socially efficient. Rather, in many cases, a social trade-off exists between curbing litigation and enhancing access to justice. Using this framework, we derive policy implications for access to justice and judicial economy.

MAURITS BARENDRECHT, Tilburg University - Faculty of Law
Email: j.m.barendrecht@uvt.nl
JIN HO VERDONSCHOT, Tilburg University - TISCO, Tilburg University - Faculty of Law
Email: J.H.Verdonschot@uvt.nl

Rules are often seen as commands that have to be observed. From the perspective of disputants, however, rules may also be tools for settling disputes. Fisher, Ury, and Patton famously recommend that negotiators look for objective criteria instead of dividing the pie by a contest of willpower. We investigate the role that objective criteria may have in dispute resolution. In particular, we study how objective criteria help parties to determine shares in liability, damages, profits, efforts, risks, timing, or other benefits and losses that have to be distributed among the parties.

We reviewed the literature on negotiation, compliance, descriptive social norms, conflict resolution, fairness, and distributive justice. We found nine suggestions for properties of objective criteria, which make them more suitable as guidelines to settle distributive issues. For each property, we also investigated which mechanism may contribute to lowering the costs of dispute resolution and to increasing the acceptance of the outcomes. On this basis, we suggest that legislators, drafters of contracts, courts, designers of dispute systems, and others wanting to contribute to conflict resolution consider investing more effort in creating and supplying objective criteria that possess the following qualities:

1. independent of willpower and allow for being applied objectively;
2. perceived as legitimate;
3. lead to outcomes that are continuous in character, not binary;
4. weigh similar elements of the situation on both sides;
5. belong to parties, reflecting their ideas about legitimacy and appropriate neutral evaluation criteria;
6. do not claim exclusivity over other objective criteria;
7. allow decision makers to tailor the outcome to the specific situation;
8. practical, in particular, requiring low-cost fact-finding; and
9. provide social information about actual application by others.

PEETER W.J. VERLEGH, Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) - RSM Erasmus University, Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM) - Joint Research Institute of Rotterdam School of Management (RSM) and Erasmus School of Economics(ESE), EUR
Email: pverlegh@rsm.nl
A. SMIDTS, Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM) - Joint Research Institute of Rotterdam School of Management (RSM) and Erasmus School of Economics(ESE), EUR
Email: asmidts@rsm.nl
DANIEL H.J. WIGBOLDUS, Radboud University Nijmegen

Previous research suggests that people form impressions of others based on their facial appearance in a very fast and automatic manner, and this especially holds for trustworthiness. However, as yet, this process has been investigated mostly in a social vacuum without taking interpersonal factors into account. In the current research, we demonstrate that both the relationship context that is salient at the moment of an interaction and the performed behavior, are important moderators of the impact of facial cues on impression formation. It is shown that, when the behavior of a person we encounter is ambiguous in terms of trustworthiness, the relationship most salient at that moment is of crucial impact on whether and how we incorporate facial cues communicating (un)trustworthiness in our final evaluations. Ironically, this can result in less positive evaluations of interaction partners with a trustworthy face compared to interaction partners with an untrustworthy face. Implications for research on facial characteristics, trust, and relationship theories are discussed.

MARTIN GRAMATIKOV, Tilburg University - Private Law Department and Faculty of Law
Email: m.a.gramatikov@uvt.nl
LAURA KLAMING, Utrecht University
Email: L.Klaming@law.uu.nl

People who experience a legal problem and pursue its resolution by a neutral person or neutral body have to deal with the costs and quality of legal procedures. High costs of reaching justice and factors related to the quality of procedures and outcomes might be perceived as barriers to access to justice. A person could lump a problem without taking any steps or decide on a strategy taking the expected barriers of access to justice into consideration. The paper includes an overview of the results from an empirical study of consumer related disputes in The Netherlands. The perceptions and evaluations of people who referred their legal problem to the Consumer Dispute Commission were analysed. A web-based questionnaire was distributed to 152 participants who used the procedure and received an outcome in the past 12 months.

Three distinct properties of the procedures were measured. These include the costs of the procedure, the quality of the procedure and quality of the outcome. The primary aim of the study is to assess and predict the role of cost, quality of procedure and quality of outcome as barriers to access to justice for this particular path to justice. The results of the study demonstrate that the perceptions of the quality of the outcome are strongly influenced by the favourability of the outcome. Positive evaluations of the quality of the procedure also increase the satisfaction with the outcome but not as strongly as outcome favourability. Monetary and non-monetary costs only have a marginal impact on evaluations of the quality of the procedure and the quality of the outcome. After controlling for the effects of outcome favourability and quality of the procedure, a negative association between monetary costs and the perceived quality of the outcome is observed. The amount of time that users spent on the procedure and the related stress were not found to affect the evaluation of the quality of the outcome. The costs of the procedure as well as the quality of the procedure are only marginal predictors of the quality of the outcome when compared with outcome favourability. This finding has significant effects for providers of paths to justice but has to be interpreted in the light of the specific features and conditions of the dispute resolution procedure carried out by the Consumer Dispute Commission. The relevance of the research findings is discussed in the light of previous research on access to justice and procedural justice.