Estimating Pain- and-Suffering Damages

This chapter argues that the best solution for dealing with the high cost of administrating pain-and-suffering damages and the alleged variation in horizontal quality is to reduce the cost of administration and increasing uniformity, rather than limiting plaintiffs’ recoveries. The best way to accomplish this is by simplifying ways to estimate pain-and-suffering losses. The chapter surveys a number of solutions discussed in the literature on how to simplify the estimation of pain-and-suffering damages to cut administrative costs. The goal is to demonstrate the feasibility of the task of estimating the loss more than to recommend any specific path to it.