INTRODUCTION"Fee shifting" refers to the rules for deciding which party to a lawsuit will pay for the attorney fee costs of the suit.' The literature on fee shifting is extensive, and virtually every page of it contains statements or predictions concerning the effects of one fee system or another on the economic behavior of litigants or classes of litigants. 2 Most of these statements are based on intuitive reasoning; with few exceptions, 3 the literature does not contain logically rigorous models of the behavioral patterns that underlie the predictions. This is hardly surprising. It is extraordinarily difficult to model the behavior of litigants. Any attempt to do so quickly makes apparent the large number of more or less arbitrary assumptions that must underlie any firm statement about the effect of one method of fee payment versus another.This paper sets out to answer with rigor some questions about four distinct fee
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.