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.

Additive damages, fat-tailed climate dynamics, and uncertain discounting

Abstract: This paper in applied theory argues that there is a loose chain of reasoning connecting the following three basic links in the economics of climate change: 1) additive damages may be more appropriate for analyzing the impacts of global warming than multiplicative damages; 2) an uncertain feedback-forcing coefficient, which might be near one with infinitesimal probability, can cause the distribution of the future time trajectory of global temperatures to have fat tails and a high variance; 3) when highvariance additive damages are discounted at an uncertain rate of pure time preference, which might be near zero with infinitesimal probability, it can make expected present discounted disutility very large. Some possible implications for welfare analysis and climate-change policy are briefly noted.

Making Government Pay: Markets, Politics, and the Allocation of Constitutional Costs

Abstract: Instrumental analysis of private law damage remedies noncontroversially assumes rational economic actors in a market environment. A privately-owned factory forced by the tort system to internalize $1000 in pollution costs suffered by a downstream neighbor will continue to pollute if, and only if, the private benefits of the pollution-producing activity exceed $1000. At least within the law and economics paradigm, we can safely take for granted the rather strong assumptions upon which this analysis rests. No one doubts, for example, that a profit-maximizing firm will tend to ignore social costs that are not reflected in financial outflows, or that it will take account of costs that are reflected in financial flows and, perhaps, change its behavior in response. These assumptions become problematic, however, when government is substituted for the private firm in this analysis. This substitution takes place routinely in discussions of constitutional remedies such as just compensation for takings, damages for constitutional torts, and the liability or property rule represented by the constitutional prohibition against federal "commandeering" of state governments. Each of these remedial systems seeks to deter government, to some socially optimal extent, from violating constitutional rights by forcing government agencies to internalize the costs of their constitutionally problematic conduct. But government does not internalize costs in the same way as a private firm. Government actors respond to political incentives, not financial ones. We cannot assume, therefore, that government will internalize social costs just because it is forced to make a budgetary outlay. While imposing financial outflows on government will ultimately create political costs (and benefits), the mechanism is complicated and depends on the model of government behavior used to translate between market costs and benefits and political costs and benefits. As the paper attempts to demonstrate, for all we currently know, government cannot be expected to respond to forced financial outflows in any predictable, let alone socially desirable, way. Having reached this conclusion, the paper proceeds to explore potential justifications for constitutional cost remedies other than optimal deterrence of government misconduct. As it turns out, the efficiency consequences of paying compensation, based on the incentives and welfare of private actors, are more likely to be perverse than beneficial. And the conventional philosophical justifications for compensation, offered in terms of morality or justice, are universally problematic and contestable. Discouraged by the seeming futility of compensation in the public law context, the paper concludes by suggesting how we might go about reinventing constitutional remedies in light of the insight that government responds to political, not market, incentives.

The Currency of Justice: Fines and Damages in Consumer Societies

Abstract: Fines and monetary damages account for the majority of legal sanctions across the whole spectrum of legal governance. Money is, in key respects, the primary tool law has to achieve compliance. Yet money has largely been ignored by social analyses of law, and especially by social theory. The Currency of Justice examines the differing rationalities, aims and assumptions built into money’s deployment in diverse legal fields and sanctions. This raises major questions about the extent to which money appears as an abstract universal or whether it takes on more particular meanings when deployed in various areas of law. Indeed, money may be unique in that it can take on the meanings of punishment, compensation, denunciation or regulation. The Currency of Justice examines the implications of the ‘monetization of justice’ as life is increasingly regulated through this single medium. Money not only links diverse domains of law; it also links legal sanctions to other monetary techniques which govern everyday life. Like these, the concern with monetary sanctions is not who pays, but that money is paid. Money is perhaps the only form of legal sanction where the burden need not be borne by the wrongdoer. In this respect, this book explores the view that contemporary governance is less concerned with disciplining individuals and more concerned with regulating distributions and flows of behaviours and the harms and costs linked with these.

No-fault compensation following adverse events attributed to vaccination: a review of international programmes

Abstract: Programmes that provide no-fault compensation for an adverse event following vaccination have been implemented in 19 countries worldwide, the first in Germany in 1961 and the most recent in Hungary in 2005. We performed a review of these programmes and determined elements that were common to all of them: administration and funding, eligibility, process and decision-making, standard of proof, elements of compensation and litigation rights. Most programmes were administered by state or national governments except in Finland and Sweden where they are coordinated by pharmaceutical manufacturers. Although funding is usually from Treasury, Taiwan (China) and the United States of America impose a tax on vaccine doses distributed. Decisions on compensation are made using established criteria or assessed on a case-by-case basis, while the standard of proof required is usually less than that required for court cases. Benefits provided by programmes include medical costs, disability pensions and benefits for noneconomic loss and death. Most countries allow claimants to seek legal damages through the courts or a compensation scheme payout but not both. We conclude that a variety of programmes, based on ethical principles, have been successful and financially viable in developed countries throughout the world. We believe there is a strong argument for widespread implementation of these programmes in other developed countries.

Economic theories of settlement bargaining

Abstract: ▪ Abstract We briefly review two basic models of settlement bargaining based on concepts from information economics and game theory. We then discuss how these models have been generalized to address issues that arise when there are more than two litigants with related cases. Linkages between cases can arise because of exogenous factors such as correlated culpability or damages, or they can be generated by discretionary choices on the part of the litigants themselves or by legal doctrine and rules of procedure.