dolus pendens

»Employing Willingness to Pay to Determine the Volitional Element of Intent in Private Law and a Conceptual Guide for Establishing ›Approval in the Legal Sense‹«: The author examines a classic legal problem from a private law perspective: the distinction between intent and negligence. The centrepiece of the dissertation is an analytical mathematical model for capturing the criterion of ›approval in the legal sense‹, which is the key criterion of the Federal Court of Justice’s doctrine of intent. The model grasps the inner mindset by applying the economic concept of willingness to pay. Subjectively advantageous and disadvantageous positions are monetised, weighted by their probabilities of realisation, and subsequently set in relation to one another to form a ›ratio of approval‹. As the quintessence, the author derives therefrom a conceptual guide for determining ›approval in the legal sense‹.