Preemption and Products Liability: A Positive Theory

Preemption and Products Liability : a Positive Theory

In a large number of products liability lawsuits, sellers assert that plaintiffs’ claims should be rejected because their products fall under some federal regulatory regime, and that the regulatory statute takes precedence over or “preempts” state tort law. This paper is an attempt to set out a positive theory of the doctrine on preemption of products liability claims. The federal case law is l...

The Supreme Court, preemption, and malpractice liability.

559 Nonetheless, the extent to which gifts of food and other items will actually decrease will not be known for some time. Terms such as “occasional” and “modest” are open to interpretation. And the gifts of food and educational items that are still allowed could influence physicians’ behavior and benefit industry. It is also uncertain whether the provision of fewer gifts will lead to a decreas...

Products Liability

Preemption Games: Theory and Experiment

Several impatient investors with private costs Ci face an indivisible irreversible investment opportunity whose value V is governed by geometric Brownian motion. The first investor i to seize the opportunity receives the entire payoff, V −Ci. We characterize the symmetric Bayesian Nash equilibrium for this game. A laboratory experiment confirms the model’s main qualitative predictions: competit...

Products Liability , Signaling and Disclosure

In this paper we examine the behavior of a firm that produces a product with a privatelyobserved safety attribute; that is, consumers cannot observe directly the product’s safety. The firm may, at a cost, disclose its safety prior to sale; alternatively, if a firm does not disclose its safety then consumers can attempt to infer its safety from the price charged. The liability system is importan...