Of course, headline writers invariably overstate what the subsequent article actually says.  The NYT Business Section ran an article by this title last week, and the headline-to-content mismatch is no more egregious than is probably typical for such articles.

The newspaper article describes a soon-to-be published empirical study of settlement behavior, the conclusion of which, according to the NYT is:

Defendants made the wrong decision by proceeding to trial far less often, in 24 percent of cases, according to the study; plaintiffs were wrong in 61 percent of cases. In just 15 percent of cases, both sides were right to go to trial — meaning that the defendant paid less than the plaintiff had wanted but the plaintiff got more than the defendant had offered.

The basic methodology, as I understand it from the NYT account, was to examine cases in which one party rejected a settlement offer and proceeded to trial, looking for variation between the rejected offer and the eventual verdict at trial.  Of course, the devil (by which I mean the actual meaning we shoudl derive from this study) will be in the detail (by which I mean what their data set looked like, what the math shows, what the choice points were, etc etc.).  But it’s certainly an article to watch for.

Michael Moffitt