Judicial Effort and the Appeal System: Theory and Experiment

Abstract

We investigate theoretically and experimentally how the existence of an appeal system influences the judicial effort of judges in the trial court. We assume that judges care about correct decisions and face reputation losses in case of reversals by the appeal court. Our model suggests that the impact of appeals depends crucially on the degree at which the appeal court's accuracy increases in the trial judge's effort. Appeals yield higher effort if this effect is strong, and effort is then increasing in the trial judges' preferences for correct outcomes. Our experimental findings underline the positive impacts of reputation losses, the endogeneity of the appeal court's accuracy and social concerns which we measure by several proxies. We argue that our findings are useful for the comparison of the appeals process in civil law vs. common law systems.