Abstract

Civil disputes feature parties with biased incentives acquiring evidence with costly effort. Evidence may then be revealed at trial or concealed to persuade a judge or jury. Using a persuasion game, we examine how a litigant’s risk preferences influence evidence acquisition incentives. We find that high risk aversion depresses equilibrium evidence acquisition. We then study the problem of designing legal rules to balance good decision making against the costs of acquisition. We characterize the optimal design, which differs from equilibrium decision rules. Notably, for very risk-averse litigants, the design is “over-incentivized” with stronger rewards and punishments than in equilibrium. We find similar results for various common legal rules, including admissibility of evidence and maximum awards. These results have implications for how rules could differentiate between high risk aversion types (e.g., individuals) and low risk aversion types (e.g., corporations) to improve evidence acquisition efficiency.

中文翻译：

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证据获取和披露的风险偏好和激励措施

摘要

民事纠纷的特点是，各方在激励措施偏颇的情况下需要付出高昂的努力来获取证据。然后可以在审判中透露证据，也可以隐瞒以说服法官或陪审团。使用说服游戏，我们研究了诉讼人的风险偏好如何影响证据获取动机。我们发现，高风险厌恶情绪会抑制均衡证据的获取。然后，我们研究了设计法律规则以平衡良好决策与购置成本之间的问题。我们描述了最佳设计的特征，它不同于均衡决策规则。值得注意的是，对于厌恶风险的诉讼人而言，该设计是“过度激励”的，其奖励和惩罚要强于均衡。我们发现各种常见的法律规则都有相似的结果，包括证据的可采性和最高赔偿。