Do Parties to Nuisance Cases Bargain after Judgment? A Glimpse inside the Cathedral

Abstract

Economic analysts of remedies often use nuisance cases as examples to illustrate their models. The illustrations commonly suppose that parties to such cases will be interested in bargaining after judgment if the court fails to award the rights to the party willing to pay the most for them. Professor Farnsworth examines twenty nuisance cases and finds no bargaining after judgment in any of them; nor did the parties' lawyers believe that bargaining would have occurred ifjudgment had been given to the loser. The lawyers said that the possibility of such bargaining was foreclosed not by the sorts of transaction costs that usually are the subject of economic models, but by animosity between the parties and by their distaste for cash bargaining over the rights at issue. Professor Farnsworth suggests that these results raise a number of interesting questions, such as how the obstacles to bargaining in these cases might be related to the absence of markets for the rights at stake, whether animosity or a distaste for bargaining should be considered transaction costs, and whether greater particularity might be needed before economic models can generate advice about remedies reliable enough to be useful to courts.

Stakeholders’ Interests and Perceptions of Bioeconomy Monitoring Using a Sustainable Development Goal Framework

“…Furthermore, they seem to be the main reason for a lacking common definition of BE. It has been assumed that all stakeholders should have an incentive to internalize external effects [31,86], which remains to be fundamentally questioned [87,88]. Moreover, it is a question of the visions and narratives: when BE is superficially understood as a potential socioeconomic transition toward holistic sustainability, ending poverty, global partnerships, and education play more vital roles; when BE is only a substitution of primary resources, the changes in socioeconomic dimensions are abstract in contrast to environmental effects.…”

Empirical Study of the Civil Justice System

“…One set of applications has included empirical studies of the extent to which bargaining arises in property rights situations. For example, Farnsworth (1999) finds no evidence that parties bargain after judgments are reached in nuisance cases; this counters one's expectations that a judgment would serve to clarify the assignment of property rights. Apparently in the 20 nuisance cases under study the relationship among the parties was sufficiently acrimonious as to make bargaining difficult.…”

Costly enforcement of property rights and the Coase theorem

“…Therefore g is monotonically decreasing on its domain of definition. From (16) we have (17) g(e c r ) > g(e c f ) for c > 1 g(e c r ) = g(e c f ) for c = 1 g(e c r ) < g(e c f ) for c < 1 which, together with the fact that g is a decreasing function demonstrates that e c r is greater or smaller than e c f as c is smaller or greater than 1. That is, the party with relatively more at stake puts more effort in equilibrium.…”