Keeping Society in the Dark: On the Admissibility of Pretrial Negotiations As Evidence in Court

We model the settlement and litigation process, allowing for incomplete information about the level of damages on the part of both the defendant and the court, and use the model to examine the effect of making (currently inadmissible) settlement demands admissible as evidence in court should a case proceed to trial. Two conclusion emerge. First, admissibility rules have efficiency consequences: making a pretrial demand admissible would increase the expected number of cases that go to trial. Second, such rules have distributional consequences and need not benefit all parties to a controversy.

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