TY  - JOUR
AU  - Ashenfelter,Orley
AU  - Bloom,David
TI  - Lawyers as Agents of the Devil in a Prisoner's Dilemma Game
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 4447
PY  - 1993
Y2  - September 1993
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w4447
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w4447.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Orley C. Ashenfelter
Industrial Relations Section
Firestone Library
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ  08544
Tel: 609/258-4040
Fax: 609/258-2907
E-Mail: c6789@princeton.edu

David E. Bloom
Harvard School of Public Health
Department of Global Health and Population
665 Huntington Ave.
Boston, MA 02115
Tel: 617/432-0866
Fax: 617/432-6733
E-Mail: dbloom@hsph.harvard.edu
AB  - The goal of this paper is to explore the possibility that the costs and benefits of legal representation are structured so that each individual party seeks legal representation in the hope of exploiting the other party, while knowing full well that failing to do so will open up the possibility .of being exploited. The first part of the paper shows how the structure of the incentives faced by the parties may be estimated, and the second describes the results of empirical tests in several different settings. The empirical results strongly suggest that the parties do face "prisoner's dilemma" incentives, although no attempt is made to determine whether the parties respond to these interviews.
ER  -