The expansion of underground structures is important in urban areas with high population density. In most large cities in the world, urban development is spreading along the structures. These structures are generally located at shallow depth; therefore study of shallow tunnels in urban areas is critical for development. During the excavation of tunnels in urban areas, creating the asymmetric se...

This paper introduces the option to conduct discovery into a model of settlement bargaining and negative expected value (NEV) suits under asymmetric information. We find that the option to conduct discovery has important effects on the standard model of settlement under asymmetric information for several reasons. First, because discovery is typically cheaper than litigation, it reduces the defe...

The decision of a claimant to obtain legal counsel, the timing of this decision, and the impact on the settlement amount an insurer successfully can offer are the focus of this study. This paper draws on strategic models of litigation/settlement with endogenous settlement amounts in the law and economics literature, but differs by endogenizing the decision to hire an attorney and its timing. Th...

Peering and transit are two types of Internet interconnection among ISPs. Peering has been a core concept to sustain Internet industry. However, for the past several years, many ISPs broke their peering arrangement because of asymmetric traffic pattern and asymmetric benefit and cost from the peering. Even though traffic flows are not a good indicator of the relative benefit of an Internet inte...

This paper examines the use of sorting by defendants as a strategy for lowering their overall costs of litigation. The effectiveness of this strategy relies on the defendant’s ability to bundle settlement offers with some other variable that is valued differently by plaintiffs. The example I examine in this paper is settlement delay. For example, if plaintiffs have different time costs of pursu...

Structured settlement underwriting is the underwriting of medically impaired lives for the purchase of an annuity to fund the settlement. Other than risk assessment, structured settlement (SS) underwriting has little in common with traditional life insurance underwriting. Most noteworthy of these differences is the relative lack of actuarial data on which to base decisions about mortality and t...

Previous comparative analyses of gross and net settlement have focused on the credit risk of the central counterparty in net settlement arrangements, and on the incentives for participants to alter the risk of the portfolio under net settlement. By modeling the trading economy that generates the demand for payment services, we are able to show some largely unexplored advantages of net settlemen...

As nuclear families have become increasingly less stable over the past quarter century, married couples have been faced with the difficult task of negotiating the terms by which marriage is ended. For parents, divorce involves questions revolving around the care and sustenance of children. In this paper we investigate whether observed divorce settlements indicate that parents make trade-offs in...