Court-Appointed Experts and Accuracy in Adversarial Litigation

Chulyoung Kim and Paul S. Koh
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Paul S. Koh: Columbia University

No 2018rwp-136, Working papers from Yonsei University, Yonsei Economics Research Institute

Abstract: Concerned about evidence distortion arising due to litigants' strong incentive to misrep- resent information provided to fact-finders, legal scholars and commentators have long suggested that courts appoint their own advisors for neutral information regarding dis- putes. This paper examines the litigants' problem of losing incentive to provide informa- tion when judges seek the advice of court-appointed experts. Within a standard litigation game framework, we find that assigning court-appointed experts involves a trade-off: al- though such experts help judges obtain more information overall, thereby reducing the number of errors during trials, they weaken litigants' incentive to supply expert informa- tion, thus undermining the adversarial nature of the current American legal system.

Keywords: litigation game; court-appointed expert; persuasion game; evidence distortion. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D82 K41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34pages
Date: 2018-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth and nep-mic
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Related works:
Journal Article: Court‐appointed experts and accuracy in adversarial litigation (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:yon:wpaper:2018rwp-136

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