The Value of Information in the Court: Get It Right, Keep It Tight
- Creators
- Iaryczower, Matias
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Shum, Matthew
Abstract
We estimate an equilibrium model of decision making in the US Supreme Court that takes into account both private information and ideological differences between justices. We measure the value of information in the court by the probability that a justice votes differently from how she would have voted without case-specific information. Our results suggest a sizable value of information: in 44 percent of cases, justices' initial leanings are changed by their personal assessments of the case. Our results also confirm the increased politicization of the Supreme Court in the last quarter century. Counterfactual simulations provide implications for institutional design.
Additional Information
© 2012 American Economic Association. We thank anonymous referees for their insightful comments and suggestions. We also thank Ernesto Dal Bo, Joshua Fischman, John Matsusaka, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, and participants at the 21st Stony Brook Game Theory Festival and the Empirical-Micro Workshops at Claremont-McKenna College, UPenn, USC, and Vanderbilt University for useful comments to previous versions of the paper. NSF grants SES-1061326 (Iaryczower) and SES-1061266 (Shum) are gratefully acknowledged.Attached Files
Published - aer.102.1.pdf
Supplemental Material - 20091207_app.pdf
Supplemental Material - 20091207_data.zip
Supplemental Material - readme.pdf
Files
Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 65728
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20160329-092158395
- SES-1061326
- NSF
- SES-1061266
- NSF
- Created
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2016-03-31Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-10Created from EPrint's last_modified field