Essays in law and economics
- Autores: Danisz Okulicz
- Directores de la Tesis: David Pérez Castrillo (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ( España ) en 2019
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Antonio Cabrales Goitia (presid.), Rosa Ferrer Zarzuela (secret.), Łukasz Woźny (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Análisis Económico por la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: TESEO
- Resumen
In this thesis, I investigate the role of information asymmetries on the market for legal services. In particular, I study how uninformed individual agents interact with lawyers and corporate agents in the civil justice system. In Chapter 1 I study a classical problem of pretrial negotiations between a plaintiff who is uninformed about the outcome of a potential trial and a defendant who is able to predict it. I contribute to the existing body of the literature by allowing the plaintiff to contract an attorney and receive unbinding, unverifiable advice during the negotiation. I find that the outcome of the negotiation strongly depends on whether the attorney or the plaintiff is more willing to resolve the case by a trial. Moreover, I show that even though a contract that perfectly aligns the incentives of the plaintiff and the attorney is always feasible, it is never optimal. If the expected value of the compensation is high then the optimal contract is an hourly wage. In the opposite scenario, a contingent fee contract is optimal. In Chapter 2 I analyze how career concerns influence the economic agents’ choice of performed tasks. For example, how they influence a lawyer’s decision on whether to take a case. I propose a model in which an agent characterized by a skill level decides whether to perform a task of random difficulty. I compare the behavior of a senior and a junior agent. A senior agent is primarily interested in the monetary pay-off, but the junior agent is also concerned with the market’s belief about his skill level. The market observes the outcome of the task, but not its difficulty. I show that a junior agent faces a trade-off between appearing successful by cherry-picking only the simplest tasks and appearing experienced by performing any task received. Typically the second effect prevails and a junior agent performs more tasks than a senior agent. I allow for the monetary payoff of the agent to be endogenously determined by contracting with a principal. I show that the principal is better-off when dealing with a junior agent since she is able to exploit his career-concerns and cut the offered price. In Chapter 3 I study how the collective litigation suits are formed, and how the defendants can interfere in this process. In collective litigations, the outcome of the trial depends on the number of litigants. I propose a dynamic model of litigation in which a defendant faces the arrival of plaintiffs over time. I show that when all plaintiffs strategically decide on filing the suit and settling the case, the defendant can completely avoid the formation of a collective. However, if some plaintiffs exogenously join the collective and the defendant holds private information about the scope of the harm then pretrial negotiations with strategic plaintiffs may fail, and the collective litigation may succeed. I analyze the role of secret settlements in this context. I show that the availability of private settlements harms the learning process of some plaintiffs and diminishes their payoffs.
Moreover, the defendant may also lose on the availability of private settlements.
