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Full-Text Articles in Applied Statistics
Incentive Awards To Class Action Plaintiffs: An Empirical Study, Theodore Eisenberg, Geoffrey P. Miller
Incentive Awards To Class Action Plaintiffs: An Empirical Study, Theodore Eisenberg, Geoffrey P. Miller
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
Incentive awards to representative plaintiffs in class actions have been the focus of recent law reform efforts and have generated inconsistent case law. But little is known about such awards. This study of 374 opinions from 1993 to 2002 finds that awards were granted in about 28 percent of settled class actions. The rate of awards varied by case category as follows: consumer credit actions 59 percent, employment discrimination cases 46 percent, antitrust cases 35 percent, securities cases 24 percent (before the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 limited awards), and corporate and mass tort actions less than 10 …
Significant Association Between Punitive And Compensatory Damages In Blockbuster Cases: A Methodological Primer, Theodore Eisenberg, Martin T. Wells
Significant Association Between Punitive And Compensatory Damages In Blockbuster Cases: A Methodological Primer, Theodore Eisenberg, Martin T. Wells
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
This article assesses the relation between punitive and compensatory damages in a data set, gathered by Hersch and Viscusi (H-V), consisting of all known punitive damages awards in excess of $100 million from 1985 through 2003. It shows that a strong, statistically significant relation exists between punitive and compensatory awards, a relation that replicates similar findings in nearly all other analyses of punitive and compensatory damages. H-V's claim that no significant relation exists between punitive and compensatory awards in these data appears to be an artifact of questionable regression methodology.