Kathryn Zeiler

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Kathryn Zeiler
Born (1969-06-03) June 3, 1969 (age 54)
Alma mater Indiana University

Golden Gate University California Institute of Technology University of Southern California Gould School of Law

Contents

California Institute of Technology
OccupationLaw professor
Employer Boston University School of Law

Kathryn M. Zeiler (born June 3, 1969) is the Nancy Barton Scholar and Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law. Zeiler's work primarily focuses on health law, torts law, law and economics, medical malpractice, and disclosure law.

Biography

Zeiler graduated from: Indiana University with a B.S. in business; Golden Gate University with a M.S. in Taxation; and California Institute of Technology with a M.S. in Social Sciences[ when? ]. [1] Zeiler then received her J.D. from University of Southern California Gould School of Law and her Ph.D. in Economics from California Institute of Technology., [1] Zeiler served as a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. [2] [3] During her Fall 2010 sabbatical from Georgetown University Law Center, Zeiler participated in a senior fellowship at the Petrie-Flom Center of Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. [4] She was named the Nancy Barton Scholar and Professor of Law positions at Boston University School of Law in 2015 . Zeiler also previously held several visiting professorships at Harvard Law School, NYU School of Law, and Boston University School of Law.[ when? ] [3]  

Scholarship

Behavioral economics

Zeiler and Charles R. Plott co-authored two articles in the American Economic Review re-examining the methodology used to establish the endowment effect theory: [5] “The Willingness to Pay-Willingness to Accept Gap, the ‘Endowment Effect,’ Subject Misconceptions, and Experimental Procedures for Eliciting Valuations,” (Cited 1137 times, according to Google Scholar [6] ) and “Exchange Asymmetries Incorrectly Interpreted as Evidence of Endowment Effect Theory and Prospect Theory” (Cited 364 times, according to Google Scholar. [6] ) . [5] [7] While less than 10% of legal articles referencing the endowment effect theory cited to Zeiler and Plott's work in the five years following the 2005 article's publication, Zeiler and Plott's work is credited as being among the most prominent challengers to the endowment effect theory and has heavily influenced behavioralist scholarship. [5] [8]

The endowment effect theory has previously been called "one of the most robust findings in the psychology of decision making” and is used by behavioral legal scholars to explain the relationship between ownership and value. [5] Zeiler and Plotts' findings challenged the endowment effect theory by arguing that observed disparities between willingness-to-accept (WTA) and willingness-to-pay (WTP) measures are not reflective of human preferences, but rather such disparities stem from encouraged experimental design practices within the field. [9] By developing an elicitation procedure that controls subject misconceptions, Zeiler and Plott found that the endowment effect theory is not sufficient to explain WTA-WTP gaps that are likely the result of subject misconceptions. [9] Since Plott and Zeiler's 2005 and 2007 experiments, a new wave of research has sought to address whether the endowment effect theory stems from reference-dependent preferences. [5] Their findings have notably paved the way for refined and alternative theories regarding the endowment effect, including the Kőszegi-Rabin theory of expectations-based reference points, which explains the absence of the endowment effect in relation to misconceptions about expectations relating to trading probability. [5]

Given the significance of these findings, Zeiler and Plotts' original conclusions have been met with some dispute. [9] There had been speculations that the WTA-WTP gap may vary according to the commodity type (e.g. low-value consumption goods, high-value consumption goods, non-marketed goods, lotteries with goods as prizes, lotteries with money prizes). [9] Critics of Zeiler and Plotts' work have found that while the lack of a WTA-WTP gap has continued to be observed in low cost commodities (like mugs), the WTA-WTP gap seems to persist in lottery systems, even when elicitation procedures attempt to control subject misconceptions. [9] [5] Therefore, these critics have argued in favor of "house money" effects, rather than subject misconceptions. [9] [5] However, in their 2011 reply to such criticisms, Zeiler and Plott (1) asserted that lottery data is contaminated by irrational choice and distorted beliefs that promote inconsistent risks and (2) argued that other literature does not support a "house money" conjecture. [5] Since these contributions to the field of behavioral economics, Zeiler has continued to advocate for the adoption of more modern views on decision theories into standard law and economic models. [10]

Medical malpractice

Zeiler has explored the differences between malpractice payments and jury verdicts, while also discussing the consequences of using malpractice insurance to satisfy malpractice claims. [11] Her work indicates that malpractice awards rarely exceed primary coverage limits, regardless of the damages awarded by juries. Therefore, even though physicians without excess-layer liability coverage are in principle vulnerable to judgments above the standard liability insurance, this is almost never the case. Policy limits almost always limit the effect of larger jury verdicts where verdicts exceed available insurance coverage. Thus, regardless of their malpractice insurance coverage, doctors rarely make out-of-pocket payments to satisfy malpractice awards. In the rare cases in which large jury verdicts or settlements are paid out above general policy limits, these payments are almost always paid by insurers. These findings call into question policy arguments in support of the implementation of damages caps to lower liability insurance premiums and improve patient care.

Methodology

Zeiler has advocated for the increased use of empiricism in health law, specifically through the utilization of data and use of the scientific method. [10] Zeiler and Michelle Mello have examined the use of empirical field studies to study causation and policy interventions. [12] While the strict adoption of the scientific method's "gold standard" of the randomized controlled trial can be difficult in the field of health law, Zeiler and Mello argue that fixed-effects models and difference-in-difference models can be used as tools of causal identification in health law studies. [12]

Related Research Articles

Rational choice theory refers to a set of guidelines that help understand economic and social behaviour. The theory originated in the eighteenth century and can be traced back to the political economist and philosopher Adam Smith. The theory postulates that an individual will perform a cost–benefit analysis to determine whether an option is right for them. It also suggests that an individual's self-driven rational actions will help better the overall economy. Rational choice theory looks at three concepts: rational actors, self interest and the invisible hand.

Behavioral economics is the study of the psychological, cognitive, emotional, cultural and social factors involved in the decisions of individuals or institutions, and how these decisions deviate from those implied by classical economic theory.

The value of life is an economic value used to quantify the benefit of avoiding a fatality. It is also referred to as the cost of life, value of preventing a fatality (VPF), implied cost of averting a fatality (ICAF), and value of a statistical life (VSL). In social and political sciences, it is the marginal cost of death prevention in a certain class of circumstances. In many studies the value also includes the quality of life, the expected life time remaining, as well as the earning potential of a given person especially for an after-the-fact payment in a wrongful death claim lawsuit.

In psychology and behavioral economics, the endowment effect is the finding that people are more likely to retain an object they own than acquire that same object when they do not own it. The endowment theory can be defined as "an application of prospect theory positing that loss aversion associated with ownership explains observed exchange asymmetries."

Medical malpractice is professional negligence by act or omission by a health care provider in which the treatment provided falls below the accepted standard of practice in the medical community and causes injury or death to the patient, with most cases involving medical error. Claims of medical malpractice, when pursued in US courts, are processed as civil torts. Sometimes an act of medical malpractice will also constitute a criminal act, as in the case of the death of Michael Jackson.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Solidarity</span> Unity of feeling or action on a common interest

Solidarity or solidarism is an awareness of shared interests, objectives, standards, and sympathies creating a psychological sense of unity of groups or classes. Solidarity does not reject individuals and sees individuals as the basis of society. It refers to the ties in a society that bind people together as one. The term is generally employed in sociology and the other social sciences as well as in philosophy and bioethics. It is a significant concept in Catholic social teaching and in Christian democratic political ideology.

The embedding effect is an issue in environmental economics and other branches of economics where researchers wish to identify the value of a specific public good using a contingent valuation or willingness-to-pay (WTP) approach. The problem arises because public goods belong to society as a whole, and are generally not traded in the market. Because market prices cannot be used to value them, researchers ask a sample of people how much they are willing to pay for the public good, wildlife preservation for example. The results can be misleading because of the difficulty, for individual society members, of identifying the particular value that they attach to one particular thing which is embedded in a collection of similar things. A similar problem occurs with a wider selection of public goods. The embedding effect suggests the contingent valuation method is not an unbiased approach to measuring policy impacts for cost-benefit analysis of environmental, and other government policies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Non-economic damages caps</span> Limitations in lawsuits

Non-economic damages caps are tort reforms to limit damages in lawsuits for subjective, non-pecuniary harms such as pain, suffering, inconvenience, emotional distress, loss of society and companionship, loss of consortium, and loss of enjoyment of life. This is opposed to economic damages, which encompasses pecuniary harms such as medical bills, lost wages, lost future income, loss of use of property, costs of repair or replacement, the economic value of domestic services, and loss of employment or business opportunities. Non-economic damages should not be confused with punitive or exemplary damages, which are awarded purely to penalise defendants and do not aim to compensate either pecuniary or non-pecuniary losses.

The liability insurance crisis in the United States of America refers to a volatile economic period during the mid-1980s. During these years, until about 1990, rising insurance premiums and an unavailability of coverage for several types of liability insurance led to a crisis that has been attributed, among others, to the expansion of tort doctrines for insurer liability and the McCarran-Ferguson exemption from antitrust laws.

Health law is a field of law that encompasses federal, state, and local law, rules, regulations and other jurisprudence among providers, payers and vendors to the health care industry and its patients, and delivery of health care services, with an emphasis on operations, regulatory and transactional issues.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tort reform</span> Legal reforms aimed at reducing tort litigation

Tort reform consists of changes in the civil justice system in common law countries that aim to reduce the ability of plaintiffs to bring tort litigation or to reduce damages they can receive. Such changes are generally justified under the grounds that litigation is an inefficient means to compensate plaintiffs; that tort law permits frivolous or otherwise undesirable litigation to crowd the court system; or that the fear of litigation can serve to curtail innovation, raise the cost of consumer goods or insurance premiums for suppliers of services, and increase legal costs for businesses. Tort reform has primarily been prominent in common law jurisdictions, where criticism of judge-made rules regarding tort actions manifests in calls for statutory reform by the legislature.

Professional liability insurance (PLI), also called professional indemnity insurance (PII) but more commonly known as errors & omissions (E&O) in the US, is a form of liability insurance which helps protect professional advising, consulting, and service-providing individuals and companies from bearing the full cost of defending against a negligence claim made by a client in a civil lawsuit. The coverage focuses on alleged failure to perform on the part of, financial loss caused by, and error or omission in the service or product sold by the policyholder. These are causes for legal action that would not be covered by a more general liability insurance policy which addresses more direct forms of harm. Professional liability insurance may take on different forms and names depending on the profession, especially medical and legal, and is sometimes required under contract by other businesses that are the beneficiaries of the advice or service.

Tom Baker is professor of law and a scholar of insurance law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

In economics, willingness to accept (WTA) is the minimum monetary amount that а person is willing to accept to sell a good or service, or to bear a negative externality, such as pollution. This is in contrast to willingness to pay (WTP), which is the maximum amount of money a consumer is willing to sacrifice to purchase a good/service or avoid something undesirable. The price of any transaction will thus be any point between a buyer's willingness to pay and a seller's willingness to accept; the net difference is the economic surplus.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">I. Glenn Cohen</span>

I. Glenn Cohen is a Canadian legal scholar and professor at Harvard Law School. He is also the director of Harvard Law School's Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Medical law</span> Area of law dealing with the practice of medicine

Medical law is the branch of law which concerns the prerogatives and responsibilities of medical professionals and the rights of the patient. It should not be confused with medical jurisprudence, which is a branch of medicine, rather than a branch of law.

An elicitation technique is any of a number of data collection techniques used in anthropology, cognitive science, counseling, education, knowledge engineering, linguistics, management, philosophy, psychology, or other fields to gather knowledge or information from people. Recent work in behavioral economics has purported that elicitation techniques can be used to control subject misconceptions and mitigate errors from generally accepted experimental design practices. Elicitation, in which knowledge is sought directly from human beings, is usually distinguished from indirect methods such as gathering information from written sources.

Christopher Tarver Robertson is a specialist in health law working at the intersection of law, philosophy and science. His research explores how the law affects decision making in domains of scientific uncertainty and misaligned incentives, which he calls "institutional epistemology." Robertson is professor, N. Neal Pike Scholar, and Associate Dean at Boston University. He is affiliated faculty with the Petrie Flom Center for Health Care Policy, Bioethics and Biotechnology at Harvard Law School. His work includes tort law, bioethics, the First Amendment, and corruption in healthcare and politics. His legal practice has focused on complex litigation involving medical and scientific disputes.

Alicia Ely Yamin teaches at Harvard University and is a Senior Fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard Law School as well as an adjunct senior lecturer at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. She is also a Senior Adviser at Partners In Health. Yamin’s career has combined fieldwork, advocacy and scholarship in relation to health-related rights. Yamin co-founded the program on human rights in health at the Asociación pro Derechos Humanos (APRODEH) in Peru.

The uncertainty effect, also known as direct risk aversion, is a phenomenon from economics and psychology which suggests that individuals may be prone to expressing such an extreme distaste for risk that they ascribe a lower value to a risky prospect than its worst possible realization.

References

  1. 1 2 "Kathryn Zeiler | School of Law". www.bu.edu. Retrieved 2020-03-21.
  2. ↑ King, Tim (2018-05-21). "Kathryn Zeiler | O'Neill Institute". O'neill. Retrieved 2020-03-21.
  3. 1 2 "Health Law Workshop: Kathryn Zeiler | Petrie-Flom Center". The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. 27 March 2017. Retrieved 2020-03-21.
  4. ↑ "About Kathryn Zeiler | Past Senior Fellows/Associates | Petrie-Flom Center". The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. 23 August 2013. Retrieved 2020-03-22.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Marzilli Ericson, Keith; Fuster, Andreas (August 2014). "The Endowment Effect". Annual Review of Economics. 6: 555–579. doi:10.1146/annurev-economics-080213-041320. S2CID   154441446. SSRN   2477775.
  6. 1 2 Google Scholar Author page, Accessed March 12, 2022
  7. ↑ Lambert, Thomas, 1971- author. How to regulate : a guide for policymakers. ISBN   978-1-316-53488-5. OCLC   1027400852.{{cite book}}: |last= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  8. ↑ Joshua, Wright; Ginsburg, Douglas (2012). "Behaviors Law and Economics: Its Origins, Fatal Flaws, and Implications for Liberty". Northwestern University Law Review. 106: 1034–1088.
  9. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Isoni, Andrea; Loomes, Graham; Sugden, Robert (April 2011). "The Willingness to Pay-Willingness to Accept Gap, the "Endowment Effect," Subject Misconceptions, and Experimental Procedures for Eliciting Valuations: Comment". American Economic Review. 101 (2): 991–1011. doi:10.1257/aer.101.2.991. S2CID   8750389 – via JSTOR.
  10. 1 2 Luppi, Barbara; Parisi, Francesco (2016-06-01). "Optimal liability for optimistic tortfeasors". European Journal of Law and Economics. 41 (3): 559–574. doi:10.1007/s10657-016-9523-6. ISSN   1572-9990. S2CID   146943760.
  11. ↑ Hall, Mark A.; Orentlicher, David; Bobinski, Mary Anne; Bagley, Nicholas; Cohen, I. Glenn (2018-02-26). Health Care Law and Ethics. Wolters Kluwer Law & Business. ISBN   978-1-4548-8180-3.
  12. 1 2 Fischman, Robert; Barbash-Riley, Lydia (2018-04-01). "Empirical Environmental Scholarship". Rochester, NY. SSRN   3039687.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
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