Settlement out of court: the disposition of medical malpractice claims

Patricia Munch Danzon, Lee A. Lillard

Expert InsightsPublished 1982

The main purpose of this paper is to present empirical estimates of a model of the disposition of claims through the courts. A second purpose of the paper is to provide evidence relevant to the policy debate over tort reform. The theoretical model is described in Sec. 2. Section 3 discusses estimation and describes the data. Section 4 reports empirical results, including goodness of fit of the model and parameter estimates. Section 5 provides estimates of the probability of winning at verdict for cases settled out of court. Section 6 analyzes the discrepancy between mean award at verdict and settlement and the extremely skewed distribution of dollar payout. Section 7 discusses the effects of actual and hypothetical tort reforms and simulates their ramifications on the entire disposition process. Section 8 contains concluding remarks.

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Document Details

  • Copyright: RAND Corporation
  • Availability: Web Only
  • Year: 1982
  • Pages: 57
  • Document Number: P-6800

Citation

Chicago Manual of Style

Danzon, Patricia Munch and Lee A. Lillard, Settlement out of court: the disposition of medical malpractice claims. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1982. https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P6800.html.
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