Decomposition of Accident Loss and Efficiency of Liability Rules

Abstract

AbstractThe main purpose of this paper is to show that the set of efficient rules which apportion liability between the victim and the tortfeasor is much larger than is generally believed to be the case. A larger set of efficient rules in general would have the implication of a less sharp conflict between economic efficiency on the one hand and non-efficiency normative criteria on the other. The condition of negligence liability which characterizes efficiency in the context of liability rules has an all-or-none character. Negligence liability requires that if one party is negligent and the other is not then the liability for the entire accident loss must fall on the negligent party. Thus within the framework of standard liability rules efficiency requirements preclude any non-efficiency considerations in situations where one party is negligent and the other is not. In this paper it is shown that accident loss can be decomposed into two parts such that while the apportionment of one part between the parties has bearing on efficiency, the apportionment of the other part has no efficiency implications. The part of accident loss which plays no role in providing appropriate incentives to the parties for taking due care can therefore be apportioned on non-efficiency considerations without in any way compromising the social goal of efficiency. For a systematic analysis of the requirements for efficiency, in this paper a notion more general than that of a liability rule, namely that of a decomposed liability rule, is introduced. A complete characterization of efficient decomposed liability rules is provided in the paper. The most important implication of the theorems of this paper is that by decomposing accident loss into two parts, the scope for non-efficiency considerations can be significantly broadened without sacrificing economic efficiency.