When adjudication is not perfectly accurate, litigants with unmeritorious cases may benefit from court errors, which in turn may result in a dilution of incentives for primary behavior and frivolous litigation. We study how shifting the court fees to the loser may improve the accuracy of adjudication. If litigation costs are high, the American rule performs better than the English rule, and vice versa if litigation costs are low. Yet, the optimal rule typically lies in between the American and the English rule, allowing the court to modulate fee shifting based on the accuracy of the evidence submitted by the parties. Our results rationalize observed patterns of use of fee shifting. In the United States, fee shifting is less common than in Europe, where litigation costs are lower. When used, fee shifting commonly depends on the accuracy of the evidence. Moreover, fee shifting filters extreme cases out of litigation, resulting in a more representative set of cases—including also more extreme ones—being adjudicated under the American rule as compared to the English rule. Finally, we identify a characteristic of fee-shifting rules, their “flatness”, which guarantees that fee shifting does not affect the settlement rate and show that flatness is a feature of an optimal mechanism.

如果裁决不完全准确，则案件不佳的诉讼人可能会从法院错误中受益，这反过来可能导致对主要行为和琐碎诉讼的激励作用减弱。我们研究了将法庭费用转移给失败者的方式如何提高裁决的准确性。如果诉讼费用很高，则美国规则的执行要优于英国规则，反之亦然，如果诉讼费用较低。但是，最佳规则通常位于美国规则和英国规则之间，从而允许法院根据当事方提交的证据的准确性来调整费用转移。我们的结果使观察到的费用转移使用模式合理化。在美国，手续费转移不如在欧洲诉讼成本较低的欧洲。使用时 费用转移通常取决于证据的准确性。此外，费用转移将极端案件从诉讼中过滤掉，与英国规则相比，在美国规则下裁决的案件更具代表性，包括更多极端案件。最后，我们确定了费用转移规则的一个特征，即它们的“统一性”，这保证了费用转移不影响结算率，并表明统一性是最优机制的一个特征。