Fee Shifting and Accuracy in Adjudication

Abstract

When adjudication is not perfectly accurate, litigants with unmeritorious cases may benefit from court errors, which in turn may result in a dilution of incentives for primary behavior and frivolous litigation. We study how shifting the court fees to the loser may improve the accuracy of adjudication. If litigation costs are high, the American rule performs better than the English rule, and vice versa if litigation costs are low. Yet, the optimal rule typically lies in between the American and the English rule, allowing the court to modulate fee shifting based on the accuracy of the evidence submitted by the parties. Our results rationalize observed patterns of use of fee shifting. In the United States, fee shifting is less common than in Europe, where litigation costs are lower. When used, fee shifting commonly depends on the accuracy of the evidence. Moreover, fee shifting filters extreme cases out of litigation, resulting in a more representative set of cases—including also more extreme ones—being adjudicated by American courts as compared to European ones. Finally, as an aside, we identify a characteristic of fee-shifting rules, their “flatness”, which guarantees that fee shifting does not affect the settlement rate and show that flatness is a feature of an optimal mechanism.