Loss Sharing between Non-Negligent Parties
Amsterdam Law School Research Paper No. 2011-07
Amsterdam Center for Law & Economics Working Paper No. 2011-08
Minnesota Legal Studies Research Paper No. 11-24
Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, Vol. 170, No. 4, pp. 571-598, 2014
32 Pages Posted: 31 May 2011 Last revised: 4 Jun 2011
Date Written: May 26, 2011
Abstract
In this paper, we study the effects and desirability of legal rules that allow the sharing of an accident loss between a non-negligent injurer and his non-negligent victim. In order to identify the virtues and limits of loss-sharing rules, we begin by considering the effect of a loss-sharing regime on parties' incentives. We address an unresolved issue in the literature, exploring whether loss-sharing in equilibrium undermines the parties' primary care incentives. We establish the conditions under which loss-sharing may be desirable and characterize the regime providing the best overall incentives to minimize the social cost of accidents. Our results indicate that loss-sharing may indeed be desirable in a vast range of situations. The results are later extended to consider the effect of parties' uncertainty in a loss-sharing regime and reveal that loss-sharing may at the same time be desirable and unnecessary in real-life accident law.
Keywords: tort, loss-sharing, negligence, strict liability, comparative fault
JEL Classification: K13, K32
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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