Kathryn Zeiler

Kathryn Marie Zeiler (born June 3, 1969) is the Nancy Barton Scholar and Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law. Zeiler's work primarily focuses on health law, torts law, law and economics, medical malpractice, and disclosure law.

Biography Zeiler graduated from: Indiana University School of Business in Bloomington with a B.S. in business in 1991; Golden Gate University with a M.S. in Taxation; and California Institute of Technology with a M.S. in Social Sciences in 2000. Zeiler then received her Juris Doctor from University of Southern California Gould School of Law in 2000 and her Doctor of Philosophy in Economics from California Institute of Technology in 2003. During her Fall 2010 sabbatical from Georgetown University Law Center, Zeiler participated in a senior fellowship at the Petrie-Flom Center of Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. She was named the Nancy Barton Scholar and Professor of Law positions at Boston University School of Law in 2015 . Zeiler also previously held several visiting professorships at Harvard Law School, New York University School of Law, and Boston University School of Law. "The Willingness to Pay-Willingness to Accept Gap, the 'Endowment Effect,' Subject Misconceptions, and Experimental Procedures for Eliciting Valuations," (Cited 1137 times, according to Google Scholar ) and “Exchange Asymmetries Incorrectly Interpreted as Evidence of Endowment Effect Theory and Prospect Theory” (Cited 364 times, according to Google Scholar. While less than 10% of legal articles referencing the endowment effect theory cited to Zeiler and Plott's work in the five years following the 2005 article's publication, Zeiler and Plott's work is credited as being among the most prominent challengers to the endowment effect theory and has heavily influenced behavioralist scholarship.

The endowment effect theory has previously been called "one of the most robust findings in the psychology of decision making” and is used by behavioral legal scholars to explain the relationship between ownership and value. By developing an elicitation procedure that controls subject misconceptions, Zeiler and Plott found that the endowment effect theory is not sufficient to explain WTA-WTP gaps that are likely the result of subject misconceptions.

Medical malpractice Zeiler has explored the differences between malpractice payments and jury verdicts, while also discussing the consequences of using malpractice insurance to satisfy malpractice claims. Her work indicates that malpractice awards rarely exceed primary coverage limits, regardless of the damages awarded by juries. Therefore, even though physicians without excess-layer liability coverage are in principle vulnerable to judgments above the standard liability insurance, this is almost never the case. Policy limits almost always limit the effect of larger jury verdicts where verdicts exceed available insurance coverage. Thus, regardless of their malpractice insurance coverage, doctors rarely make out-of-pocket payments to satisfy malpractice awards. In the rare cases in which large jury verdicts or settlements are paid out above general policy limits, these payments are almost always paid by insurers. These findings call into question policy arguments in support of the implementation of damages caps to lower liability insurance premiums and improve patient care.

Methodology Zeiler has advocated for the increased use of empiricism in health law, specifically through the utilization of data and use of the scientific method. While the strict adoption of the scientific method's "gold standard" of the randomized controlled trial can be difficult in the field of health law, Zeiler and Mello argue that fixed-effects models and difference-in-difference models can be used as tools of causal identification in health law studies.