Berkeley Program in Law and Economics

Mainstream literature of the economic analysis of litigation, and classical legal scholarship, frequently deal with the unjustified delay in legal process and its related increase of costs. The aim of this paper is to analyze the agent's incentives to delay in relation to the interest rate applied to lawsuits. For this purpose, a model of incentives to delay, consistent with the standard economic analysis of legal procedure (differing perceptions model), is developed.