Costly Pretrial Agreements

Mega‐regional trade Agreements: Costly distractions for developing countries?

Pretrial Settlement with Fairness

We introduce fairness into three models of pretrial settlement and find that it increases the incidence of trial in each. This is true despite the fact that the fairness taste parameter is common knowledge. In the standard model, the party who makes the final offer can extract essentially all of her bargaining partner's trial cost through this offer. A taste for fairness is reflected in the per...

Understanding Pretrial Publicity

Prejudicial pretrial publicity (PTP) constitutes a serious source of juror bias. The current study examined differences in predecisional distortion for mock jurors exposed to negative PTP (NPTP) versus nonexposed control participants. According to work by K. A. Carlson and J. E. Russo (2001), predecisional distortion occurs when jurors bias new evidence in favor of their current leading party (...

Pretrial Settlement with Contingency Fees

We introduce contingency fees into the Reinganum and Wilde (1986) signaling model of litigation. The effect of contingency fees on settlement depends upon the details of the contingency fee contract and the nature of the informational asymmetry assumed in the model. Introducing bifurcated fee contracts where the contingency percentage is higher at trial changes the selection of disputes at tria...

The Downstream Consequences of Misdemeanor Pretrial Detention

In misdemeanor cases, pretrial detention poses a particular problem because it may induce otherwise innocent defendants to plead guilty in order to exit jail, potentially creating widespread error in case adjudication. While practitioners have long recognized this possibility, empirical evidence on the downstream impacts of pretrial detention on misdemeanor defendants and their cases remains li...