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Assessing Punitive Damages...
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In this paper, the authors report and discuss the implications of an experimental study involving punitive damage awards, including damage caps, compensatory judgment multipliers, and conversion formulas based on jury judgments on a bounded numerical scale.Abstract:
This essay reports and discusses the implications of an experimental study involving punitive damage awards. The study finds that in products liability cases, people's normative judgments (about outrageousness and appropriate punishment) are relatively uniform, at least when measured on a bounded numerical scale (0 to 6). With the unbounded dollar scale, however, outcomes become extremely erratic and unpredictable. Various reform proposals, designed to overcome erratic awards, are discussed, including damage caps, compensatory judgment "multipliers," and conversion formulas based on jury judgments on a bounded numerical scale. Implications are also discussed for many other issues of law and economic valuation, including compensatory damages in such areas as pain and suffering, libel, sexual harassment and other civil rights violations, contingent valuation, and intentional infliction of emtional distress.read more
Citations
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Book ChapterDOI
Economic Preferences or Attitude Expressions?: An Analysis of Dollar Responses to Public Issues
TL;DR: For instance, this article found that participants in contingent valuation surveys and jurors setting punitive damages in civil trials provide answers denominated in dollars, rather than as indications of economic preferences, and that these answers are better understood as expressions of attitudes than as indicators of economic preference.
Journal ArticleDOI
Music, pandas, and muggers: on the affective psychology of value.
TL;DR: The authors investigated the relationship between the magnitude or scope of a stimulus and its subjective value by contrasting two psychological processes that may be used to construct preferences: valuation by feeling and valuation by calculation.
Posted Content
Affect Monitoring and the Primacy of Feelings in Judgment
TL;DR: The authors examined the judgmental properties of consciously monitored feelings and found that the monitoring of feelings is an often diagnostic pathway to evaluation in judgment and decision making, and that people often make evaluative judgments by monitoring their feelings toward the target.
Journal ArticleDOI
Affect Monitoring and the Primacy of Feelings in Judgment
TL;DR: In this paper, the judgmental properties of consciously monitored feelings were examined in the context of moderately complex and consciously accessible stimuli, and it was shown that, compared to cold, reason-based assessments of the target, the conscious monitoring of feelings provides judgmental responses that are potentially faster, more stable and consistent across individuals, and importantly, more predictive of the number and valence of people's thoughts.
Journal ArticleDOI
Social functionalist frameworks for judgment and choice: intuitive politicians, theologians, and prosecutors.
TL;DR: The authors identify three alternative social functionalist starting points for inquiry: pragmatic politicians trying to cope with accountability demands from key constituency in their lives, principled theologians trying to protect sacred values from secular encroachments, and prudent prosecutors trying to enforce social norms.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns
John R. Lott,David B. Mustard +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors used cross-sectional time-series data for U.S. counties from 1977 to 1992 to find that allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons deters violent crimes, without increasing accidental deaths.
Journal ArticleDOI
What Do Judges and Justices Maximize? (The Same Thing Everybody Else Does)
TL;DR: In this article, a positive economic theory of the behavior of appellate judges and Justices is presented, arguing that the effort to insulate judges from significant economic incentives, through devices such as life tenure and stringent conflict of interest rules has not rendered judicial behavior immune to economic analysis.
Journal ArticleDOI
Explaining Deviations from the Fifty-Percent Rule: A Multimodal Approach to the Selection of Cases for Litigation
TL;DR: This paper found that multimodal case characteristics associated with violations of these assumptions cause plaintiff win rates to deviate from the 50-percent baseline in the manner that simple law-and-economics models would suggest.
Journal ArticleDOI
Sequential versus Unitary Trials: An Economic Analysis
TL;DR: The entire structure of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure calls for sequential decision-making as mentioned in this paper, and a bifurcated or ''sequential'' trial on liability and damages, as opposed to a unified trial on both issues, is the exception rather than the norm.
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