The "Reasonable Man" and other legal standards
- Creators
- Miller, Alan D.
Abstract
In the common law of negligence, an individual breaches the duty of due care if she fails to act as would a "reasonable man" under the circumstances. A natural question, first posed by Rubinstein [8], is whether the "reasonable man" can be derived from the views of actual agents. Rubinstein introduced an axiomatic model and showed that there does not exist a non-dictatorial aggregation method which satisfies several normatively appealing properties. I introduce a new model based on a different understanding of the "reasonable man" and provide a characterization of the "union rule", the most inclusive view of reasonableness satisfying a basic Pareto criterion. The union rule requires that a jury must unanimously agree to find a defendant liable for negligence.
Additional Information
Helpful comments were provided by Christopher P. Chambers, Federico Echenique, Philip T. Hoffman, Matias Iaryczower, D. Roderick Kiewiet, R. Preston McAfee, Stuart McDonald, Robert Ostling, Dov Samet, Eran Shmaya, Matthew Spitzer, Yair Tauman, Oscar Volij, David Wettstein, and seminar participants at the California Institute of Technology and at the Eighteenth International Conference on Game Theory. All errors are my own.Attached Files
Submitted - sswp1277.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 79561
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20170728-152555784
- Created
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2017-08-02Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2019-10-03Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Social Science Working Papers
- Series Name
- Social Science Working Paper
- Series Volume or Issue Number
- 1277