Court-Appointed Experts and Accuracy in Adversarial Litigation
International Journal of Economic Theory, forthcoming
34 Pages Posted: 11 May 2016 Last revised: 30 Aug 2018
Date Written: January 2018
Abstract
Concerned about evidence distortion arising from litigants' strong incentive to misrepresent information to fact-finders, legal scholars and commentators have long suggested that the court appoint its own advisor for a neutral piece of information about the dispute. This paper studies the incentive problem faced by the litigants when the judge seeks advice from the court-appointed expert. Within a standard litigation game framework, we find a trade-off in utilizing the court-appointed expert: although it helps the judge obtain more information overall, thereby reducing the number of mistakes at trial, it hampers the litigants' incentive to supply expert information, which undermines the adversarial nature of the current American legal system.
Keywords: litigation game, court-appointed expert, persuasion game, evidence distortion
JEL Classification: C72, D82, K41
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation