Screening in Courts: On the Joint Use of Negligence and Causation Standards
研究了为何法律同时使用过失和因果关系两个标准，发现当侵权人的避害成本是私人信息时，联合使用可促使不同成本类型自我选择，低成本者谨慎行事，高成本者故意疏忽以逃避责任，从而提升社会福利。
In legal systems all over the world, injurers are held liable only when the probability of having caused an accident exceeds a critical threshold (causation standard) and when behaving negligently. In a complete information framework, the joint use of the two instruments is puzzling as both whether a potential injurer has taken due care and whether he meets a specific causation standard depend only on his care level. We explain this puzzle with private information about injurers' avoidance costs, and we derive conditions under which the joint use of both instruments can induce self-selection of different cost types. With self-selection, low-cost firms take due care, whereas high-cost firms behave negligently, thereby aiming at escaping liability via the causation standard. Compared to the optimal single-instrument policy, we derive conditions under which such self-selection policies are strictly welfare-enhancing. The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Yale University. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.