Academic

Boudreau & McCubbins on Adversarial Expert Testimony

By Lawrence Solum

Cheryl Boudreau and Mathew D. McCubbins (University of California, Davis and University of California, San Diego - Political Science) have posted Nothing But the Truth? Experiments on Adversarial Competition, Expert Testimony, and Decision Making on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

Many scholars question whether competition between experts in legal, political, and economic contexts elicits truthful information and enables citizens to make informed decisions. And, nowhere is this question more heatedly debated than in research on our adversarial legal system. In this paper, we analyze experimentally the conditions under which competition between experts induces the experts to make truthful statements and enables citizens to improve their decisions. Our results demonstrate that, contrary to our theoretical predictions and to critics of our adversarial legal system, competition induces enough truth-telling to allow subjects to achieve modest improvements in their decisions. Then, when we impose even weak institutions (such as small penalties for lying or slim chances of verification) upon the competing experts, we observe dramatic improvements in both the experts' propensity to tell the truth and in subjects' decisions. We find similar improvements when the competing experts are permitted to exchange reasons for why their statements may be correct.

Interesting results.  Highly recommended.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on February 29, 2008 (boomark / email).