Asymmetric Reimbursement and Contingent Fees in Environmental Conflicts: Observable vs. Unobservable Contracts

We investigate the impact of observability of contracts between a plaintiff and his attorney on both the efficiency of the environmental conflict and the fairness of the resulting outcome from the environmental conflict. By including two specific game-theoretic models (an observable-contract game an...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Sung-Hoon Park, Chad E. Settle
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2023-07-01
Series:Games
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/14/4/55
Description
Summary:We investigate the impact of observability of contracts between a plaintiff and his attorney on both the efficiency of the environmental conflict and the fairness of the resulting outcome from the environmental conflict. By including two specific game-theoretic models (an observable-contract game and an unobservable-contract game), we find two key results: (i) The unobservability of a contract may increase inefficiency of the environmental conflict in terms of legal efforts; however, (ii) the unobservability of a contract may increase the fairness of the outcome in terms of the plaintiff’s probability of winning the contest.
ISSN:2073-4336