Axiomatic analysis of liability problems with rooted-tree networks in tort law

Takayuki Oishi*, Gerard van der Laan, René van den Brink

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

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Abstract

We analyze a legal situation in which a plaintiff suffers the total damage of the cumulative injury that is caused by multiple sequences of tortfeasors’ wrongful acts. This liability situation is modeled by a tuple consisting of a rooted-tree network of causation of the injury, and a list of marginal damages. The problem is to determine how to share the total damage among the tortfeasors in such situations. A rule is a mapping that associates with each liability problem a list of payments to be made by the tortfeasors to pay for the plaintiff’s harm. We axiomatize two rules that are obtained as the Nucleolus and the Shapley value, respectively, of a coalitional game with tortfeasors as players. The axioms involved in these axiomatizations are derived from the legal concept of tort law.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)229-258
Number of pages30
JournalEconomic Theory
Volume75
Issue number1
Early online date17 Jan 2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jan 2023

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.

Funding

FundersFunder number
Japan Society for the Promotion of ScienceJSPS KAKENHI Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B), Project #17K13751

    Keywords

    • Axiomatizations
    • Liability problems
    • Nucleolus
    • Rooted-tree networks
    • Shapley value
    • Tort law

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