IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wpa/wuwple/0505004.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Rational Legal Decision-Making, Value Judgment and Efficient Precaution in Tort law

Author

Listed:
  • MINGLI ZHENG

    (University of Macau)

  • SAJID ANWAR

    (University of South Australia)

Abstract

By reinterpreting Savage axioms as axioms of the social rationality over resource allocations, we derive a social welfare function encompassing individual social values and a social attitude towards distributional inequality. Wealth maximization becomes the purpose of law only if individuals have equal social values and the society does not care about distributional inequality. In tort law, when the injurer is less socially valued than the victim, the society imposes a stricter due precaution level, and punitive damages will be awarded. Tort law also implicitly transfers wealth from the less socially valued party to the more socially valued party.

Suggested Citation

  • Mingli Zheng & Sajid Anwar, 2005. "Rational Legal Decision-Making, Value Judgment and Efficient Precaution in Tort law," Law and Economics 0505004, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:wpa:wuwple:0505004
    Note: Type of Document - pdf; pages: 28. forthcoming in JITE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/le/papers/0505/0505004.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Blackorby, Charles & Donaldson, David & Weymark, John A., 1999. "Harsanyi's social aggregation theorem for state-contingent alternatives1," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 32(3), pages 365-387, November.
    2. BLACKORBY, Charles & BOSSERT, Walter & DONALDSON, David, 2002. "In Defense of Welfarism," Cahiers de recherche 2002-02, Universite de Montreal, Departement de sciences economiques.
    3. Marcus Fleming, 1952. "A Cardinal Concept of Welfare," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 66(3), pages 366-384.
    4. Itzhak Gilboa & David Schmeidler, 1992. "Additive Representation of Non-Additive Measures and the Choquet Integral," Discussion Papers 985, Northwestern University, Center for Mathematical Studies in Economics and Management Science.
    5. Gilboa, Itzhak, 1987. "Expected utility with purely subjective non-additive probabilities," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 16(1), pages 65-88, February.
    6. John C. Harsanyi, 1955. "Cardinal Welfare, Individualistic Ethics, and Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 63(4), pages 309-309.
    7. Mongin Philippe, 1995. "Consistent Bayesian Aggregation," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 66(2), pages 313-351, August.
    8. Gul, Faruk, 1992. "Savagés theorem with a finite number of states," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 57(1), pages 99-110.
    9. Philippe Mongin, 2002. "Is there progress in normative economics?," Chapters, in: Stephan Boehm & Christian Gehrke & Heinz D. Kurz & Richard Sturn (ed.), Is There Progress in Economics?, chapter 10, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    10. Louis Kaplow & Steven Shavell, 2001. "Any Non-welfarist Method of Policy Assessment Violates the Pareto Principle," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 109(2), pages 281-286, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Mingli Zheng, 2014. "Lobbying for wealth redistribution by changing the social planner’s preferences," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 26(1), pages 79-92, January.
    2. Mingli Zheng, 2018. "Subjective value judgments of distributive justice and legal decision-making," Asia-Pacific Journal of Regional Science, Springer, vol. 2(1), pages 177-194, April.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Fleurbaey, Marc & Zuber, Stéphane, 2017. "Fair management of social risk," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 169(C), pages 666-706.
    2. Mongin, Philippe & Pivato, Marcus, 2015. "Ranking multidimensional alternatives and uncertain prospects," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 157(C), pages 146-171.
    3. Jean Baccelli & Marcus Pivato, 2021. "Philippe Mongin (1950–2020)," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 90(1), pages 1-9, February.
    4. Mongin, Philippe, 2019. "Interview of Peter J. Hammond," CRETA Online Discussion Paper Series 50, Centre for Research in Economic Theory and its Applications CRETA.
    5. Charles Blackorby & David Donaldson & Philippe Mongin, 2004. "Social Aggregation Without the Expected Utility Hypothesis," Working Papers hal-00242932, HAL.
    6. Zuber, Stéphane, 2016. "Harsanyi’s theorem without the sure-thing principle: On the consistent aggregation of Monotonic Bernoullian and Archimedean preferences," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 63(C), pages 78-83.
    7. John Weymark, 2005. "Measurement theory and the foundations of utilitarianism," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 25(2), pages 527-555, December.
    8. BLACKORBY, Charles & BOSSERT, Walter & DONALDSON, David, 2003. "Harsanyi's Social Aggregation Theorem : A Multi-Profile Approach with Variable-Population Extensions," Cahiers de recherche 03-2003, Centre interuniversitaire de recherche en économie quantitative, CIREQ.
    9. Stanca, Lorenzo, 2021. "Smooth aggregation of Bayesian experts," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 196(C).
    10. Marc Fleurbaey, 2018. "Welfare economics, risk and uncertainty," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 51(1), pages 5-40, February.
    11. Askoura, Youcef & Billot, Antoine, 2021. "Social decision for a measure society," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 94(C).
    12. Eric Danan & Thibault Gajdos & Jean-Marc Tallon, 2015. "Harsanyi's Aggregation Theorem with Incomplete Preferences," American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 7(1), pages 61-69, February.
    13. Crès, Hervé & Tvede, Mich, 2022. "Aggregation of opinions in networks of individuals and collectives," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 199(C).
    14. Kolm, Serge-Christophe, 1998. "Chance and justice: Social policies and the Harsanyi-Vickrey-Rawls problem," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 42(8), pages 1393-1416, September.
    15. Marc Fleurbaey, 2010. "Assessing Risky Social Situations," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 118(4), pages 649-680, August.
    16. Itzhak Gilboa & Dov Samet & David Schmeidler, 2004. "Utilitarian Aggregation of Beliefs and Tastes," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 112(4), pages 932-938, August.
    17. Blackorby, Charles & Bossert, Walter, 2004. "Interpersonal comparisons of well-being," Economic Research Papers 269605, University of Warwick - Department of Economics.
    18. Thibault Gajdos & Jean-Christophe Vergnaud, 2013. "Decisions with conflicting and imprecise information," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 41(2), pages 427-452, July.
    19. Itzhak Gilboa & Larry Samuelson & David Schmeidler, 2014. "No‐Betting‐Pareto Dominance," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 82(4), pages 1405-1442, July.
    20. Federica Ceron & Vassili Vergopoulos, 2017. "Aggregation of Bayesian preferences: Unanimity vs Monotonicity," Post-Print halshs-01539444, HAL.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    rationality; value judgement; tort law; punitive damage;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D70 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - General
    • K41 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior - - - Litigation Process
    • K49 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior - - - Other

    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:wpa:wuwple:0505004. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: EconWPA (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de .

    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.