The Poker-Litigation Game

Abstract: Is litigation a serious search for truth or simply a game of skill or luck? Although the process of litigation has been modeled as a Prisoner's Dilemma, as a War of Attrition, as a Game of Chicken and even as a simple coin toss, no one has formally modeled litigation as a game of poker. This paper is the first to do so. We present a simple "poker-litigation game" and find the optimal strategy for playing this game.