Damages

About: Damages is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 9365 publications have been published within this topic receiving 89750 citations. The topic is also known as: compensation award.

Putting a value on injuries to natural assets: The BP oil spill

Abstract: When large-scale accidents cause catastrophic damage to natural or cultural resources, government and industry are faced with the challenge of assessing the extent of damages and the magnitude of restoration that is warranted. Although market transactions for privately owned assets provide information about how valuable they are to the people involved, the public services of natural assets are not exchanged on markets; thus, efforts to learn about people's values involve either untestable assumptions about how other things people do relate to these services or empirical estimates based on responses to stated-preference surveys. Valuation based on such surveys has been criticized because the respondents are not engaged in real transactions. Our research in the aftermath of the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill addresses these criticisms using the first, nationally representative, stated-preference survey that tests whether responses are consistent with rational economic choices that are expected with real transactions. Our results confirm that the survey findings are consistent with economic decisions and would support investing at least $17.2 billion to prevent such injuries in the future to the Gulf of Mexico's natural resources.

On the Optimal Structure of Liability Laws

Abstract: We consider the control of two-party accidents through the use of liability rules that assign damages according to whether or not predetermined standards for care have been met. Particular emphasis is given to how the differential in the costs of accident avoidance activities affects the optimal legal rule and optimal care standards. It is shown that when the costs are close to uniform across individuals, an approximation to the first-best can be obtained. Moreover, alternative legal rules are equally efficient in achieving this situation. When the differential widens, legal rules will differ in their ability to reach the second-best. In contrast to previous models of liability law, it is shown that the courts must play an active adjudicatory role in the optimal solution.

Sharing Damages among Multiple Tortfeasors

Abstract: In our society, losses are often caused by the activities of more than one actor. The apportionment of such losses among the various responsible actors raises difficult and controversial questions. Recently, courts have confronted these questions primarily when determining whether defendants held jointly and severally liable for a given harm have the right to seek contribution from other responsible parties. The availability of a right to contribution received particular attention in the early 1980s when the United States Supreme Court decided whether the right existed under antitrust law' and employment discrimination law.2 More recently, the