More on Punitive Damages

Punitive damages research continues to become richer and more textured. The increasing availability of data fuels this trend. In a recent paper, Stephen Choi (NYU) and Ted Eisenberg (Cornell) expand punies research into the securities arbitration context. In Securities Arbitration: An Empirical Study, the authors draw on a data set comprised of 6,800 securities arbitration awards and find that "claimants prevailed in 48.9 percent of arbitrations, and that 9.1% of those claimant victories included a punitive damages award. We also report that the existence of a punitive damages award was associated with claims that suggested egregious misbehavior and with claims with higher compensatory awards. We test whether securities arbitration results in different punitive damages compared with litigation before juries and judges. The relation between punitive and compensatory awards did not differ substantially between securities arbitrators and data on juries available from periodic Civil Justice Surveys by the Bureau of Justice Statistics."