Andrew Daughety and Jennifer Reinganum, two economists from Vanderbilt, recently posted an article on SSRN titled, simply, “Settlement.”

I don’t know how it works in the economics literature.  In many areas of the law, insanely short article titles are typically reserved either for those who are unspeakably preeminent or who are the first to a topic.  For example, I have a preeminent ConLaw colleague who published, many years ago, a seminal article entitled, simply, “Marbury,” in reference to the famous case of Marbury v. Madison.  Most of those of us who are mere academic mortals craft far narrower topics for ourselves, typically resulting in muti-tiered law review titles only barely shorter than the articles themselves.  (For example “Crying Fowl: An Empirical Comparative Examination of the Role of Poultry in Multijurisdictional Commercial Transactions: An Argument in Favor of Redistributivism in Domestic Securities Regulations,” or some such thing.)  Anyway, with a title like, “Settlement,” I decided I needed to read it.

Having spent some time with the article, I still feel like I need to read it, but I didn’t budget enough time on my first pass.  The parts I have read are reasonably digest-able by non-economists such as myself.  I have only a moderate stomach for strings of math formulas using Greek letters, and I got through just fine.  The article weighs in at more than 120 pages, though, and it is almost hopelessly ambitious in the scope of its coverage.  I’ve tried jumping ahead to examine discrete pieces, and it works well enough that way.  For example, it has a tidy little section on the conclusions offered by many game theoretic analyses of cost-shifting mechanisms (for example, American Rule v. Continental Rule in litigation) as well as offer-based cost-shifting (as with Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 68.)  From an ADR perspective, I wish that the authors had included, in that section, more on the effects of non-binding arbitration rules, etc.  But then, it’s hard to put down an article this size and, in good conscience, wish that it included more.  Perhaps what I wish is that it were a book…  A book written by someone with the patience these two authors apparently have for speaking (mostly) to non-economists about what economists and game theoreticians are thinking about.

Michael Moffitt