Title

Information Costs and the Civil Justice System

Authors

Keith N. Hylton, Boston University School of LawFollow

Author granted license

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-2018

Publisher

Boston University School of Law

Language

en-US

Abstract

Litigation is costly because information is not free. Given that information is costly and perfect information prohibitively costly, courts will occasionally err. Finally, the fact that information is costly implies an unavoidable degree of informational asymmetry between disputants. This paper presents a model of the civil justice system that incorporates these features of the real world and probes its implications for compliance with the law, efficiency of law, accuracy in adjudication, trial outcome statistics, and the evolution of legal standards. The model’s claims are applied to and tested against the relevant empirical and legal literature.

Comments

American Law and Economics Association Presidential Address of 2017

forthcoming in the American Law and Economics Review

Recommended Citation

Keith N. Hylton, Information Costs and the Civil Justice System , in No. 18-17 Boston University School of Law, Law and Economics Research Paper (2018).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/411