Daniel Ingberman - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Daniel Ingberman

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Strategic Management, 2016

No portion of this paper may be reproduced without permission of the author(s). Discussion papers... more No portion of this paper may be reproduced without permission of the author(s). Discussion papers are research materials circulated by their authors for purposes of information and discussion. They have not undergone formal peer review or the editorial treatment accorded RFF books and other publications.-ii-Should 'State of the Art ' Safety Be a Defense Against Liability?

Liability for injury due to hazardous products often hinges on the safety of the defendants produ... more Liability for injury due to hazardous products often hinges on the safety of the defendants product relative to the safety of similar products. For instance, firms that can show their product's safety was "state of the art" can in some cases have their liability removed. This paper explores the legal definition of what it means to be state of the art and considers whether or not the availability of the defense is likely to improve product safety. The state of the art defense's effect on safety is found to depend on whether courts rely on a "technological advancement" or a "customary practice" tests of state of the art. When consumers are under-informed regarding product risks, the technological advancement test improves safety, and welfare, in a broad set of situations.

Many important social choice problems involve selecting a single community (the “host”) to bear t... more Many important social choice problems involve selecting a single community (the “host”) to bear the cost of a project which yields positive net benefit for society as a whole (referred to as NIMBYs, for "Not In My Back Yard"). For example, society needs to dispose of its waste, but no one wants a waste facility in their backyard. This paper asks: Should NIMBYs be sited by market or government? To this end, we compare market allocations with allocations derived from governments (i.e., legislative choice with and without voluntary agreements). With either market or government allocation, a key factor in assessing outcome efficiency is whether or not potential hosts possess the ability to make "final" offers. If the allocating institution (rather than potential hosts) has this ability, then inefficient outcomes are likely. We consider the constitutional problem of choosing among these three NIMBY-allocators under a "veil of ignorance", and show that the al...

SSRN Electronic Journal

A conspiracy to conceal information is a central allegation in prominent mass tort claims totalin... more A conspiracy to conceal information is a central allegation in prominent mass tort claims totaling billions of dollars. Analysis of such claims can be informed by evaluating firms' economic incentives to conceal substantive information. We show that these incentives — and thus the potential merit of such allegations — relies on the dynamic nature of the "markets" for information and innovation, which determine current and future expected public information dissemination and determine the likelihood of successful concealment of information.

The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance Issues and Practice, 1996

For their comments, we thank Nick Dopuch, Phil Dybvig, Ron King, Göran Skogh, the anonymous refer... more For their comments, we thank Nick Dopuch, Phil Dybvig, Ron King, Göran Skogh, the anonymous referees, and seminar participants at Washington University, the 1994 American Law and Economics Association meetings, and the 1995 joint meetings of the Geneva Association and the European Association of Law and Economics. I Like Skogh, but in contrast to the literature on vicarious liability, our analysis features riskneutral contracting parties.

Abstract: This paper investigates settlement incentives in securities litigation when a plaintiff... more Abstract: This paper investigates settlement incentives in securities litigation when a plaintiff seeks to recover damages from multiple co-defendants (here an auditor and a manager/firm). We extend previous research in two ways. First, we model how US ...

Int Rev Law Economics, 1999

The paper explores the deterrent effect of punitive damages when capital investment is endogenous... more The paper explores the deterrent effect of punitive damages when capital investment is endogenous to the legal rule. Irrespective of the level of damages, firms can reduce their expected liabilities by either increasing safety (the law’s intended goal) or reducing wealth exposed to liability. We show that punitive damages can exacerbate this wealth reduction effect and thereby reduce deterrence. The

Washington University Law Review, 1994

This paper investigates the settlement and litigation incentives of auditors under two legal regi... more This paper investigates the settlement and litigation incentives of auditors under two legal regimes: the joint and several regime and the several only regime. The model's predictions are that if all defendants have full solvency, then auditors have lower expected liabilities under the joint and several regime than under the several only regime. This follows since securities law does not treat auditors and their codefendants symmetrically. That is, auditors are not liable if the financial statements are not materially misstated. However, as the codefendant's (firm's) wealth falls, auditors eventually have lower expected liability under several only liability. The reason is that as the wealth of the codefendant falls, the auditor bears an increasing fraction of total expected damages under joint and several liability. However, under several only liability, an auditor's liabilities do not depend on the solvency of codefendants.

The Law and Economics of the Environment, 2001

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Strategic Management, 2015

Formal Theories of Politics, 1989

The Journal of Legal Studies, 1994

... Optimal dam-ages when safety reduces the scale of losses, therefore, are either com-pensatory... more ... Optimal dam-ages when safety reduces the scale of losses, therefore, are either com-pensatory, when bs &lt; kIL, or capped, when ... In that case, the damages that increase the incentive to invest in probability-reducing safety measures (punitive damages) weaken the incentive to ...

The Journal of Legal Studies, 1997

Case and statutory law often condition liability on the safety of the defendant's product rel... more Case and statutory law often condition liability on the safety of the defendant's product relative to competing products. This article explores the safety and welfare implications of the commonly observed “echnological advancement” and “customary practice” tests of products liability. We find that, in general, the technological advancement test yields excessive safety expenditures, while the customary practice test leads to inadequate safety. In addition, we show that characteristics of the law vary across jurisdictions and in ways that can significantly affect the tests' desirability. Two particularly important characteristics are the degree to which the tests are conclusive and whether or not compliance with government standards is used as an external complement to relative safety evidence. Jurisdictions can mitigate the worst tendencies of relative safety tests by not allowing them to be conclusive and by allowing for reference to government or other external standards.

Public Choice, 1985

Stylized institutions for direct democracy referenda are examined in a dynamic full information e... more Stylized institutions for direct democracy referenda are examined in a dynamic full information environment with myopic voters. Competitive-agenda (median-voter) processes are contrasted with monopolistic (controlled-agenda) processes by extending existing static analyses to a class of dynamic institutions not previously characterized, the status quo reversion rule. This highlights the dependence of the progression of real equilibrium allocations over time on institutional

Public Choice, 1987

Randall Calvert's paper, "Reputation, Commitment, and the dynamics of Effective Legislat... more Randall Calvert's paper, "Reputation, Commitment, and the dynamics of Effective Legislative Leadership," is an outstanding example of the use of game theory to formalize a traditional notion in political science. As in many of his earlier papers, here also Calvert has combined his deep understanding of traditional ideas with an elegant analysis to produce a set of powerful and intuitive results. As such, the paper is an important contribution to the literature, both methodologically as well as substantively. Calvert's model builds on the reputation literature pioneered by Kreps and Wilson (1982) and Milgrom and Roberts (1982). In each of two periods, a legislative leader is faced with a possible rebellion by a self-interested follower. The leader can punish a defiant Follower by applying a sanction at some cost, but i f this cost is too large, the leader will choose not to punish, at least in the second period. The cost to the leader of punishing, however, is private information. Hence the followers' decisions to rebel depend on their beliefs concerning the probability that the leader will in fact choose to punish rebellion. An effective leader in this framework is thus one who can (p. 88) "establish a reputation for being willing to punish," i .e. , one who is willing to punish even when the current period net benefits of