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An economic rationale for dismissing low‐quality experts in trial
Author(s) -
Kim Chulyoung
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
scottish journal of political economy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.4
H-Index - 46
eISSN - 1467-9485
pISSN - 0036-9292
DOI - 10.1111/sjpe.12129
Subject(s) - supreme court , argument (complex analysis) , quality (philosophy) , inference , economic justice , law and economics , judicial opinion , decision quality , economics , law , actuarial science , political science , computer science , epistemology , operations management , artificial intelligence , biochemistry , chemistry , philosophy , team effectiveness
Abstract The history of the admissibility standard for expert testimony in American courtrooms reveals that the standard has gradually increased to a high level following a series of important decisions by the Supreme Court. Whether such a stringent standard for expert testimony is beneficial or detrimental to the American justice system is still under fierce debate, but there has been scant economic analysis of this issue. This paper attempts to fill the gap by presenting a game‐theoretic argument showing that a stringent admissibility standard operates to increase the accuracy of judicial decision‐making in certain situations. More precisely, when the judge faces uncertainty regarding an expert's quality, the admissibility standard may provide the judge with information about the quality of expert testimony, thereby increasing the accuracy of judicial decision‐making by mitigating the judge's inference problem. I show the ways in which this effect dominates at trial and discuss related issues.