The Market for Expert Witnesses

Abstract

In recent years the economic incentives of attorneys and judges have been modeled to evaluate their impact on legal system outcomes. Missing from the analysis is the expert witness. From the objective functions of the plaintiff economist and the plaintiff and defense attorneys, we derive the market supply and demand for plaintiff economists. The analysis indicates that experts have an incentive to develop methods to increase the amount of an award for a case and offers an explanation for the observation of a high fee expert with a heavy caseload existing among many low fee experts with relatively light caseloads. (14, K4, L2)