Hedonic Adaptation and the Settlement of Civil Lawsuits.

This paper examines the burgeoning psychological literature on happiness and hedonic adaptation (a person‘s capacity to preserve or recapture her level of happiness by adjusting to changed circumstances), bringing this literature to bear on a previously overlooked aspect of the civil litigation process: the probability of pretrial settlement. The glacial pace of civil litigation is commonly thought of as a regrettable source of costs to the...