A Teaching Note on Strict Liability in Tort

A Note on the Optimality of Strict Liability

I show below that, contrary to what is widely accepted, in situations of unilateral care a rule of strict liability is not optimal. The difference between my results and previous ones follows from my consideration of the victim’s rational behavior. JEL number: K13 (Tort Law and Product Liability). * I would like to thank Dan Orr and Tom Ulen for helpful comments on earlier drafts. Of course, re...

A Note on the Equivalence between Contractual and Tort Liability Rules (*)

The aim of this paper is to conciliate some conclusions of the economic theories of breach of contract and tort law. The main result is that the two efficient alternatives that tort law identifies (negligence rule and strict liability with a defense of contributory negligence) are mirrored by two efficient ways of defining contract damages. The first consists of forcing the debtor to pay expect...

A note on strict passivity

We show that there exists an explicit descriptor state space format which actually describes all strictly passive transfer functions. A key advantage of this explicitly strictly passive descriptor state space format resides in its relation with congruence projection-based reduced order modeling, where the resulting reduced order model is also cast in this same format. Another advantage of the f...

Tort Liability: a Minefield for Managed Care?

The restructuring of health insurance contracts and health care delivery systems under managed care is the result of competitive attempts to reduce the inefficiencies that developed in medical markets under traditional indemnity insurance. Liability rules that continue to apply norms of customary care threaten to undermine these potential efficiency gains. Liability rules under managed care sho...

Who Pays for Tort Liability Claims? An Economic Analysis of the U.S. Tort Liability System