Project description
Reducing bias and inequality in the assessment of non-pecuniary damages
Non-pecuniary damages are non-economic losses that cannot be measured accurately in money. In the EU, the awarding of such damages is fragmented and surrounded by bias. Addressing these challenges, the EU-funded FullCompensation project aims to develop evidence-based guidelines to help decision-makers award damages and reconcile equal treatment and personalisation. These guidelines will then be offered to Member States as a model legislative proposal which they can adopt to encourage rationalisation in this area.
Objective
In the EU, full compensation of non-pecuniary damages remains fragmented and subjective, leading to unequal outcomes within jurisdictions. This is despite numerous attempts to reduce variability, e.g. barèmes and tables. The project aims to develop evidence-based guidelines for decision-makers to award damages, reconciling equal treatment and personalisation. Such guidelines will be developed into a model legislative proposal for Member States to foster rationalisation in this sector. The goal is to reduce bias, uncertainty, subjectivity and unequal treatment in the assessment of non-pecuniary damages, minimising the social and individual costs of awarding such damages, while at the same time investigating the actual perception of full compensation by victims.
To this end, the project will (1) explore damages awarding mechanisms in the EU and the legal aids to assess compensation; (2) investigate, through online and laboratory behavioural experiments, the actual perception of fair and full compensation by adjudicators, identifying their mechanisms of psychic satisfaction and their cognitive reaction to different legal aids; (3) based on the collected experimental results, develop tools to assess compensation and assist decision-making processes.
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Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
6200 MD Maastricht
Netherlands