| In many court systems and also in different layers around the world, parties entangled in dispute face quite large delay. The aim of this doctoral research project is to yield a more sophisticated insight into the economic consequences of court delay by formulating a general theory of the demand for trials.; The interdependencies of measures against delay and their effect on the behaviour of litigants, more particularly on the demand for trials, was so far not well understood. From an economic point of view, the measures against court delay may not necessarily lead to desirable outcomes. The rationale of these initiatives might be questioned. To be able to evaluate the effects of court delay this phenomenon must be studied in a pragmatic context. Therefore, the study determines the impact of delay on the demand for public (civil) dispute resolution in a first step to be able to draw conclusions with respect to the effects of national welfare in a second step.; In a legal dispute, the behaviour of parties is basically motivated by the net expected benefits or costs of a trial. Despite some interesting outcomes with respect to not-time-related aspects, like optimism and legal expense insurance, the results of the time-related effects on behaviour have to be put into perspective from an economic point of view. There is no urgent need to fight delay from a behavioural-economic approach, since in theory it holds that advantages and disadvantages due to court delay will be balanced in an economy. This conclusion only holds under the strict theoretical and necessary assumption of an even distribution over all possible combinations between plaintiff- and defendant-clusters. More reality-oriented research would have to find out if this conclusion holds for particular court systems or layers.; Contrary to the behavioural approach, however, the social welfare effects are clearly negative. Delay is a source for legal uncertainty and for a loss of faith in justice. Besides undermining altruistic goals of a public legal system, court delay leads to a direct welfare loss due to avoidable transaction costs and public expenses. The direct link between court delay and welfare loss are due to judge-made errors (may it be due to time pressure or a bad quality of evidence due to time), and the potential of strategic behaviour.; The overall conclusion of the analysis is that the net effects of court delay are negative. As a consequence, waiting lists for trials are not an efficient, second-best rationing device of the demand for trials and clearly need to be remedied. The research showed that a long-term solution should be based on a demand-focused approach. |
