Paper Abstract
97. Adi Leibovitch and Tom Zur, Decision Cascades, 06/2024.
Abstract: Empirical legal scholarship has long documented the phenomenon of order effects in legal decisions, often attributed to the cognitive bias known as the contrast effect. While the contrast effect revolves around the biased perception of the subsequent case due to the order in which cases are presented to judges, all existing evidence of order effects in legal decisions comes from settings where cases are presented and decided sequentially. This paper presents a theory of decision cascades, suggesting that order effects in legal decisions stem from the order in which cases are decided rather than presented. Instead of mapping the numerous attributes of a given case onto a cardinal scale, judges calibrate the sentence in each case relative to the sentence previously determined. The paper presents evidence from a pre-registered incentivized experiment that allows us to separate the impact of the presentation and decision dimensions on sentencing outcomes, as well as to establish the counterfactual fully informed sentences and the optimal wedge between them. We find that when cases are heard sequentially, but decided together, order effects are eliminated. Furthermore, when two cases are heard and decided sequentially, regardless of order, the sentence imposed on the second case equals the sentence in the preceding case with the addition or subtraction of the optimal wedge. Consequently, any error in the evaluation of the preceding case is fully transmitted to the decision that follows. The implications are far-reaching—while cases must be heard in some order, a theory of decision cascades suggests that end-of-sequence decision protocols could offer a promising debiasing mechanism.