Search, bargaining, and signalling in the market for legal services
研究了律师购买客户案件是否应被允许的问题，发现当律师掌握案件价值的私人信息时，允许购买可能降低社会效率，对法律经济学和契约设计有参考价值。
Over the last eight centuries, lawyers in common law countries have generally been precluded from buying their clients’ cases. Recently, a number of economists and lawyers have argued that sale should be allowed so as to eliminate moral hazard, particularly when contingent fees are used; this argument is based on full‐information reasoning. However, if the lawyer has private information about the case value, then compensation demands potentially signal this value when the client can search over lawyers. We provide a formal model and a family of computational examples that show that allowing (possibly partial) purchase can reduce expected social efficiency .