Product Liability and Regulation: Establishing the Appropriate Institutional Division of Labor
探讨了侵权责任与监管两种制度在产品健康安全风险控制中的互动关系，主张风险监管应主导市场激励，产品责任应退居辅助角色。
Society has several institutional mechanisms that promote the control of product health and safety risks and compensation of the income losses that these risks generated. For risks traded in the market, economic forces at work foster each of these objectives. Social insurance programs, such as worker's compensation, promote the compensation objective directly and influence safety incentives through the meritrating procedure. Two additional institutional mechanisms, which are the focus of this paper, are tort liability and regulation. Each of these institutions has assumed a more active role in the last two decades and has been the focus of considerable academic and policy debate. What is most noteworthy about these discussions is that both policymakers and economic analysts generally view each institution as the only societal response to the risk. In the field of legal scholarship, this narrow approach has been termed the tortcentric perspective by Richard Stewart (1987a, b). Such a piecemeal approach may be necessary in some cases as an analytic convenience, but it neglects potentially important interactions of the two systems. In this paper I explore the nature of the institutional interactions in Section I and examine the appropriate institutional design in Section II. The general conclusion is that risk regulation should play a dominant role in augmenting market incentives for risk reduction and that the scope of product liability remedies should be scaled back to reflect its subsidiary role.