The Value of Information in the Court - Get it Right, Keep it Tight

Iaryczower, Matías; Shum, Matthew

doi:10.2139/ssrn.1483820

Cited by 28 publications

(46 citation statements)

References 50 publications

(24 reference statements)

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“…10 For structural estimation of ideological models of voting in committees (that do not directly incorporate career concerns) see Poole andRosenthal (1985, 1991), Heckman and Snyder (1997), Londregan (1999), that we introduced in Iaryczower and Shum (2009) to deal with ideology and common values in the context of equilibrium behavior (for a connected approach, see Iaryczower, Katz, and Saiegh (2009)). 11 Our model of collective decision-making is close to that of Duggan and Martinelli (2001), although here players' preferences are public information.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…This inequality resolves this classification problem by setting γ i,1 (γ i,0 ) equal to the maximum (minimum) of the two identified voting probabilities. For more details, see Hall and Zhou (2003) or the discussion in Iaryczower and Shum (2009). i will stay put in one decision. This illustrates the second principle at work: absence of variability in individual decisions signals large bias.…”

Section: Estimationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Given these estimates, we can compute a measure of the value of information in the court, as introduced in Iaryczower and Shum (2009). The measure, FLEX, is the probability that justice i votes differently than what she would have voted for in the absence of her private case information:…”

Section: First Stage Coefficients and A First Look At Deep Parametersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We find that justices who are shielded from voters not only have better information, but are also more likely than elected justices to change their preconceived opinions about a case. We quantify the flexibility of a judge to incorporate case-specific information with the FLEX measure introduced in Iaryczower and Shum (2009). This is the probability that a judge votes differently than what she would have voted for in the absence of case-specific information.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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To elect or to appoint? Bias, information, and responsiveness of bureaucrats and politicians

Iaryczower

Lewis

Shum

2013

Journal of Public Economics

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In this paper, we address empirically the trade-offs involved in choosing between bureaucrats and politicians. In order to do this, we need to map institutions of selection and retention of public officials to the type of public officials they induce. We do this by specifying a collective decision-making model, and exploiting its equilibrium information to obtain estimates of the unobservable types. We focus on criminal decisions across US states' Supreme Courts. We find that justices that are shielded from voters' influence ("bureaucrats") on average (i) have better information, (ii) are more likely to change their preconceived opinions about a case, and (iii) are more effective (make less mistakes) than their elected counterparts ("politicians"). We evaluate how performance would change if the courts replaced majority rule with unanimity rule.

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Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Estimationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: First Stage Coefficients and A First Look At Deep Parametersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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To elect or to appoint? Bias, information, and responsiveness of bureaucrats and politicians

Iaryczower

Lewis

Shum

2013

Journal of Public Economics

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“…In the model, the individual structural parameters of interest are preferences and the precision of private assessments, which we call expertise. The estimation follows the two-step approach of Iaryczower and Shum (2012), who estimate these quantities for US Supreme Court justices. The model is estimated both under the assumption that voting is sincere, in which case members behave as if their votes determine policy, and strategic, in which case members condition their votes on being pivotal.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preferences or private assessments on a monetary policy committee?

Hansen

McMahon

Rivera

2014

Journal of Monetary Economics

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Using Bank of England voting data, we show empirically that members' votes are driven by heterogeneous individual assessments of the economy as well as their individual policy preferences. Estimates indicate that internal committee members form more precise assessments than externals and are also more hawkish. The estimates allow the first quantification of the gain due to information aggregation on monetary policy committees. The marginal gain from additional committee members tapers quickly after five members. There is no evidence of gains through externals' moderating internals' preferences. A relatively small committee of highly informed internal members emerges as a desirable committee structure.Keywords: Committees; monetary policy; private information.JEL Codes: E52, E58, D78 * We are very grateful to the editor Ricardo Reis and an anonymous referee for their insightful suggestions. We would also like to thank Tim Besley, Alan Blinder, Pablo Casas, Fabio Canova, Francesco Caselli, Antonio Ciccone, Greg Crawford, Thomas Cunningham, Wouter den Haan, Nathan Foley-Fisher, Francesco Giavazzi, Charles Goodhart, Matias Iaryczower, Kosuke Imai, Clare Leaver, Gilat Levy, Massimo Motta, Andrew Oswald, Morten Ravn, Karl Schlag, Kevin Sheedy, Jón Steinsson, Thijs van Rens, and members of Kosuke Imai's reading group for insightful comments on this and earlier versions of this work. We have also benefited from the suggestions of seminar participants at the

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Estimating Bayesian Decision Problems with Heterogeneous Expertise

2015

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We consider the recent novel two-step estimator of Iaryczower and Shum (2012), who analyze voting decisions of US Supreme Court justices. Motivated by the underlying theoretical voting model, we suggest that where the data under consideration displays variation in the common prior, estimates of the structural parameters based on their methodology should generally benefit from including interaction terms between individual and time covariates in the first stage whenever there is individual heterogeneity in expertise. We show numerically, via simulation and re-estimation of the US Supreme Court data, that the first order interaction effects that appear in the theoretical model can have an important empirical implication.

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The Value of Information in the Court - Get it Right, Keep it Tight

Cited by 28 publications

References 50 publications

To elect or to appoint? Bias, information, and responsiveness of bureaucrats and politicians

To elect or to appoint? Bias, information, and responsiveness of bureaucrats and politicians

Preferences or private assessments on a monetary policy committee?

Estimating Bayesian Decision Problems with Heterogeneous Expertise

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