IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hol/holodi/0911.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Signaling, Learning and Screening Prior to Trial: A Theory of Preliminary Injunctions

Author

Listed:
  • Thomas D. Jeitschko

    (Department of Economics, Michigan State University)

  • Byung-Cheol Kim

    (School of Economics, Georgia Institute of Technology)

Abstract

The decision to request a preliminary injunction-a court order that bans a party from certain behavior until its lawfulness is ascertained in a final court ruling at trial-is an important litigation instrument in many areas of the law including antitrust, copyright, patents, trademarks, employment and labor relations as well as contracts. The process of filing for a preliminary injunction and the court's ruling on such a request generates information that can affect possible settlement decisions. We consider these implications when there is uncertainty about both the plaintiff’s damages as well as the merits of case in the eyes of the court. Both plaintiff and defendant revise their beliefs about the case strength in dispute once they observe the court's ruling on preliminary injunctive relief. We study how such learning affects the likelihood of settlement. A precursor to this analysis is the study of the strategic role of preliminary injunctions as a means to signal the plaintiff's willingness to settle.

Suggested Citation

  • Thomas D. Jeitschko & Byung-Cheol Kim, 2009. "Signaling, Learning and Screening Prior to Trial: A Theory of Preliminary Injunctions," Royal Holloway, University of London: Discussion Papers in Economics 09/11, Department of Economics, Royal Holloway University of London.
    • Handle: RePEc:hol:holodi:0911
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.rhul.ac.uk/economics/Research/WorkingPapers/pdf/dpe0911.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    preliminary injunction; learning; signaling; screening; litigation; settlement.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D8 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty
    • K21 - Law and Economics - - Regulation and Business Law - - - Antitrust Law
    • K41 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior - - - Litigation Process
    • K42 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior - - - Illegal Behavior and the Enforcement of Law

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hol:holodi:0911. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Claire Blackman (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.rhul.ac.uk/economics/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.