Inconsistent Decisions Research Articles

Consistent Collective Decisions Under Majorities Based on Differences

The main criticism to the aggregation of individual preferences under majority rules refers to the possibility of reaching inconsistent collective decisions from the election process. In these cases, the collective preference includes cycles and even could prevent the election of any alternative as the collective choice. The likelihood of consistent outcomes under two classes of majority rules constitutes the aim of this paper. Specifically, we focus on majority rules that require certain consensus in individual preferences to declare an alternative as the winner. In the case of majorities based on difference of votes, such requirement asks to the winner alternative to obtain a difference in votes with respect to the loser alternative taken into account that individuals are endowed with weak preference orderings. Same requirement is asked to the restriction of these rules to individual linear preferences, whereas in the case of majorities based on difference in support, the requirement has to do with the difference in the sum of the intensities for the alternatives in contest.

Genetic Factors of Individual Differences in Decision Making in Economic Behavior: A Japanese Twin Study using the Allais Problem.

Why does decision making differ among individuals? People sometimes make seemingly inconsistent decisions with lower expected (monetary) utility even when objective information of probabilities and reward are provided. It is noteworthy, however, that a certain proportion of people do not provide anomalous responses, choosing the alternatives with higher expected utility, thus appearing to be more “rational.” We investigated the genetic and environmental influences on these types of individual differences in decision making using a classical Allais problem task. Participants were 1,199 Japanese adult twins aged 20–47. Univariate genetic analysis revealed that approximately a third of the Allais problem response variance was explained by genetic factors and the rest by environmental factors unique to individuals and measurement error. The environmental factor shared between families did not contribute to the variance. Subsequent multivariate genetic analysis clarified that decision making using the expected utility theory was associated with general intelligence and that the association was largely mediated by the same genetic factor. We approach the mechanism underlying two types of “rational” decision making from the perspective of genetic correlations with cognitive abilities.

Qualitätsmanagement in der Medizin. Was muss der Chirurg wissen?

Quality management (QM) is a method used in the field of economics that was adopted late by the medical sector. The coincidence of quality management and what is referred to as economisation in medicine frequently leads to QM being - incorrectly - perceived as part of the economisation problem rather than as part of its solution. Quality assurance defines and observes key performance indicators for the achievement of quality objectives. QM is a form of active management that intends to systematically exclude the effects of chance. It is supposed to enable those in charge of an institution to deal with complex processes, to influence them and achieve quality even under unfavourable circumstances. Clearly defined written standards are an important aspect of QM and allow for 80 % of patients to be treated faster and less labour-intensively and thus to create more capacity for the individual treatment of the 20 % of patients requiring other than routine care. Standards provide a framework to rely on for department heads and other staff alike. They reduce complexity, support processes in stress situations and prevent inconsistent decisions in the course of treatment. Document management ensures transparent and up-to-date in-house standards and creates continuity. Good documents are short, easy to use, and, at the same time, comply with requirements. Specifications describe in-house standards; validation documents provide a forensically sound documentation. Quality management has a broad impact on an institution. It helps staff reflect on their daily work, and it initiates a reporting and auditing system as well as the systematic management of responses to surveys and complaints. Risk management is another aspect of QM; it provides structures to identify, analyse, assess and modify risks and subject them to risk controlling. Quality management is not necessarily associated with certification. However, if certification is intended, it serves to define requirements, increase motivation for the implementation of measures to be taken, and provide long-term continuity in newly adopted processes. Specialist certificates issued by medical associations frequently emphasise an interdisciplinary treatment approach; however, their certification processes are often of poor quality. The effectiveness and efficiency is evident for individual QM instruments in medicine. It is very likely that quality management improves effectiveness in the whole field of medicine, but this has yet to be proved.

Stare Decisis in Canadian Administrative Law

“When the facts change, I change my opinion,” John Maynard Keynes once tartly replied to a questioner concerned that the economist had altered his position on a matter of public importance, before adding, witheringly: “What do you do, sir?” How to deal with changed circumstances is the central topic of this paper. When the facts change, should administrative decision-makers change with them? In section I, I briefly review the development of stare decisis in the common law, before turning in section II to outline the Canadian approach to stare decisis in the administrative context. From there I assess three points at which the status quo comes under pressure, what I call the problems of clarity (section III), consistency (section IV) and coherence (section V). Stare decisis is not at all the judicial straitjacket it is sometimes imagined to be and so the very flexible approach to precedent taken by administrative decision-makers is not only defensible but laudable. Mischief results when judges declare statutory provisions to be ‘clear’, insist on consistency, or orchestrate coherence from on high. As to clarity, setting a judicial interpretation of a statutory provision in aspic threatens to compromise regulatory flexibility over time. The Canadian approach to stare decisis allows administrative decision-makers to change their positions in accordance with changing circumstances, but if a court carves the only possible, acceptable interpretation into a tablet of stone this flexibility is eliminated as future administrative decision-makers are forever encumbered by the judicial edict.As to consistency, the administrative-law approach to stare decisis comes under stress where there is a temptation for courts to harmonize inconsistent lines of administrative decisions. However, the rule of law is not a trump card to be played when there is judicial disquiet about inconsistent administrative decision-making. There are inevitably “quantitative” -- how much of an inconsistency? -- and “temporal” -- how far apart in time are the inconsistent decisions? -- aspects to the difficult judgement calls on whether intervention would be appropriate to ensure consistency. This is an open invitation to judges to correct administrative decisions they find aberrant but could not qualify as unreasonable.A final pressure point comes in the form of incoherence: what about an administrative decision that is a reasonable resolution of a particular case but which is reached by flawed logic? If the flawed logic is not sanctioned, it remains on the books and may influence future administrative decision-makers. Deference suggests that reviewing courts should wring their hands -- and then wash them: the reasonable decision should be upheld and the flawed logic should be worked out through the administrative process. Administrative decision-makers are no less canny than courts in recognizing problematic decisions and distinguishing them -- indeed, they may be more capable of doing so while also respecting the overall fabric of their own regulatory system. Flawed logic alone does not invite judicial intervention.

Effect of color visualization and display hardware on the visual assessment of pseudocolor medical images.

Even though the use of color in the interpretation of medical images has increased significantly in recent years, the ad hoc manner in which color is handled and the lack of standard approaches have been associated with suboptimal and inconsistent diagnostic decisions with a negative impact on patient treatment and prognosis. The purpose of this study is to determine if the choice of color scale and display device hardware affects the visual assessment of patterns that have the characteristics of functional medical images. Perfusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was the basis for designing and performing experiments. Synthetic images resembling brain dynamic-contrast enhanced MRI consisting of scaled mixtures of white, lumpy, and clustered backgrounds were used to assess the performance of a rainbow ("jet"), a heated black-body ("hot"), and a gray ("gray") color scale with display devices of different quality on the detection of small changes in color intensity. The authors used a two-alternative, forced-choice design where readers were presented with 600 pairs of images. Each pair consisted of two images of the same pattern flipped along the vertical axis with a small difference in intensity. Readers were asked to select the image with the highest intensity. Three differences in intensity were tested on four display devices: a medical-grade three-million-pixel display, a consumer-grade monitor, a tablet device, and a phone. The estimates of percent correct show that jet outperformed hot and gray in the high and low range of the color scales for all devices with a maximum difference in performance of 18% (confidence intervals: 6%, 30%). Performance with hot was different for high and low intensity, comparable to jet for the high range, and worse than gray for lower intensity values. Similar performance was seen between devices using jet and hot, while gray performance was better for handheld devices. Time of performance was shorter with jet. Our findings demonstrate that the choice of color scale and display hardware affects the visual comparative analysis of pseudocolor images. Follow-up studies in clinical settings are being considered to confirm the results with patient images.

Consistent collective decisions under majorities based on difference of votes

The main criticism to the aggregation of individual preferences under majority rules refers to the possibility of reaching inconsistent collective decisions from the election process. In these cases, the collective preference includes cycles and even could prevent the election of any alternative as the collective choice. The likelihood of consistent outcomes under a class of majority rules constitutes the aim of this paper. Specifically, we focus on majority rules that require certain consensus in individual preferences to declare an alternative as the winner. Under majorities based on difference of votes, the requirement asks to the winner alternative to obtain a difference in votes with respect to the loser alternative taking into account that individuals are endowed with weak preference orderings. Same requirement is asked to the restriction of these rules to individual linear preferences.

Fish diversity and fisheries in the Caspian Sea and Aral–Syr Darya basin in the Republic of Kazakhstan at the beginning of the 21st Century

For many years fishing was one of the most important human activities in the Caspian Sea and Aral-Syr Darya basin. This article summarizes the results of research conducted by the authors during 1991–2010. Drastic shifts in commercial fish catches as well as in fish diversity were revealed for both the Caspian Sea and the Aral-Syr Darya areas as a result of overfishing, poaching, exotic species introduction, and habitat alterations. The policies of the government authorities in the field of nature protection, especially those involving fish resources, may be characterized by the adoption of controversial and inconsistent decisions and subsequent restructuring of those state institutions charged with nature protection that resulted. These policies did not promote sustainable use of nature resources and will have long-lasting impacts on the protection of fish and other aquatic biological resources. Some recommendations are provided for attaining sustainable fisheries management in the North Caspian and Aral regions.

The Big Data Newsvendor: Practical Insights from Machine Learning

We investigate the data-driven newsvendor problem when one has n observations of p features related to the demand as well as historical demand data. We propose two approaches to finding the optimal order quantity in this new setting -- Machine Learning (ML) with and without regularization, and Kernel-weights Optimization (KO). We show that the resulting Big Data newsvendor problem can be solved by LP, MIP or QCQP programs under the ML approach, and by a simple sorting algorithm under the KO approach. We justify the use of feature information by showing that not including them yields inconsistent decisions, which translates to sub-optimal costs even with infinite amount of demand data. We then derive finite-sample performance bounds on the out-of-sample costs of the feature-based decisions, which shows (i) the Big Data regime, when over-fitting dominates finite-sample bias, is defined by p > O(n^{-1/(2 8/p)}\sqrt{\log{(n)}}), and (ii) both regularized ML and KO are effective methods to handle over-fitting. Finally, we apply the feature-based algorithms for nurse staffing in a hospital emergency room using a data set from a large UK teaching hospital and find that (i) the best KO and ML algorithms beat the best practice benchmark by 23% and 24% respectively in the out-of-sample cost with statistical significance at the 5% level, and (ii) the best KO algorithm is faster than the best ML algorithm by three orders of magnitude and the best practice benchmark by two orders of magnitude.

A Lagrangian heuristic for an integrated lot-sizing and fixed scheduling problem

This paper presents a novel approach for solving an integrated production planning and scheduling problem. In theory as well as in practice, because of their complexity, these two decision levels are most of the time treated sequentially. Scheduling largely depends on the production quantities (lot sizes) computed at the production planning level and ignoring scheduling constraints in planning leads to inconsistent decisions. Integrating production planning and scheduling is therefore important for efficiently managing operations. An integrated model and an iterative solution procedure were proposed in earlier research papers: The approach has limitations, in particular when solving the planning problem. In this paper, a new formulation is proposed to determine a feasible optimal production plan, i.e. lot sizes, for a fixed sequence of operations on the machines when setup costs and times are taken into account. Capacity constraints correspond to paths of the conjunctive graph associated to the sequence. An original Lagrangian relaxation approach is proposed to solve this NP-hard problem. A lower bound is derived and an upper bound is calculated using a novel constructive heuristic. The quality of the approach is tested on numerous problem instances.

Consistent Collective Decisions Under Majorities Based on Difference of Votes

The main criticism to the aggregation of individual preferences under majority rules refers to the possibility of reaching inconsistent collective decisions from the election process. In these cases, the collective preference includes cycles and even could prevent the election of any alternative as the collective choice. The likelihood of consistent outcomes under a class of majority rules constitutes the aim of this paper. Specifically, we focus on majority rules that require certain consensus in individual preferences to declare an alternative as the winner. Under majorities based on difference of votes, the requirement asks to the winner alternative to obtain a difference in votes with respect to the loser alternative taking into account that individuals are endowed with weak preference orderings. Same requirement is asked to the restriction of these rules to individual linear preferences.

Penalties for dangerous tackles in the Australian NRL competition. Rugby League ‘judiciary’ decisions reviewed from the Chicago School perspective on the economics of crime and punishment

Rugby league is a major football code within the Australian and New Zealand domestic markets for spectator sport. Current controversies include concern about the way the sport’s judiciary body reaches decisions regarding penalties for dangerous play. The argument presented in this paper is that inconsistent and inappropriate judiciary decisions are presently being imposed because of shortcomings in articulating the principles upon which such decisions should be based. It is argued that improved results in terms of both efficiency and fairness could be achieved if administrators consciously injected an understanding of the economics of crime and punishment as an underpinning for their judiciary processes.

The EU Market Economy Investor Principle: A Good Paradigm?

The Market Economy Investor Principle (MEIP) is one of the most fundamental precepts of European state aid law. It is a useful tool at the disposal of the European Commission to assess whether in any given situation state aid might exist. Member states also use it to ensure compliance in funding commercial firms, whether public or private. With continuous clarifications and refinement by numerous Commission text, decisions and the European Court's judgments, it captures the center-spot of state aid assessment practices. But the doctrine has also been severely criticized for its inherent theoretical incoherence as well as complex practical application which sometimes resulted in inconsistent and unpredictable decisions. While government actions are always influenced by public policy objectives and other political factors, is it really practical or effective to compare those with that of private investors on pure commercial criteria? How far is it acceptable to hypothesize the existence of a model 'private investor‘ that may never exist? Lack of a proper market benchmark sometimes results in providing wider discretion in the hands of the Commission. Is it good for a legal principle to empower an executive body to use it as a political tool? The MEIP would certainly be a better paradigm when it could provide solution to many of such questions. Given the legal uncertainty, inconsistency and unpredictability related with the test, considerable care need to be exercised to ensure that 'not every characteristics of the state is imputed to the private investor, otherwise the MEIP is liable to act as a distorting mirror that flatters the image of the States as an investor.'

The Corporate Conspiracy Vacuum

The intracorporate conspiracy doctrine immunizes an enterprise and its agents from conspiracy prosecution based on the legal fiction that an enterprise and its agents are a single actor incapable of the meeting of two minds to form a conspiracy. The doctrine, however, misplaces incentives in contravention of agency law, criminal law, tort law, and public policy. As a result of this absence of accountability, harmful behavior is ordered and performed without consequences, and the victims of the behavior suffer without appropriate remedy.The vacuum at the center of American conspiracy law has now warped the doctrines around it. Especially in the wake of the financial crisis, prosecutors and the public are searching for new tools to combat corporate conspiracy. The most obvious and tested tool would be to roll back the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine. In the absence of this solution, frustration with applying the doctrine has led to over-reliance on alternative methods to hold agents of enterprises responsible for their actions. Examples of such alternative doctrines include piercing the corporate veil doctrine, the responsible corporate officer doctrine, and unusual approaches such as denying the retroactive imposition of the corporate veil and adopting reverse piercings of the corporate veil.But these doctrines were developed in and adapted to other circumstances. They do not take into account the coordination of actions within an enterprise and the unique nature of conspiracy that fall — and should fall — into the heart of behavior that would trigger liability if not for the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine. Using alternative doctrines to impose liability on behavior that would otherwise be recognized as an intracorporate conspiracy results in inconsistent decisions and disproportionate awards. In sum, not calling a conspiracy a conspiracy asks the wrong questions and sends the wrong signals throughout the law on corporate and individual responsibility.

Implication of Globalisation for Competition Policy: The Need for International Co-Operation in Merger and Cartel Enforcement

The complexity of co-operation in cross-border competition law enforcement increased significantly between 1990 and 2011, underlining the urgency to improve techniques and tools of competition authority co-operation. As international trade has increased, the number of competition law enforcement activities related to cross-border mergers and cartels has risen substantially (up by about 250-466% since the 1990s). At the same time, the number of competition authorities has increased by a factor of 6 since 1990, from under 20 to 120 as of 2013. The spread of competition law is a positive development but co-operation has become more complicated as a result. Between 1990 and 2011, an index of complexity of co-operation on cross-border cases has increased by between 23 and 53 times. As trade and cross-border business activity increases in the future, and young competition authorities become more active, effective co-operation will become even more complicated. Ultimately, the complexity of co-operation can lead to undesirable outcomes, such as inconsistent decisions and unchallenged illegal conduct. The costs of failures of co-operation are identified, and found to be substantial. To overcome potential failures in co-operation, new and enhanced methods of competition law co-operation should be explored.

Commercializing the Digital Canvas

Over the past two decades, a series of trends in constitutional and intellectual property have significantly reshaped the impact of traditional intellectual property laws for the art community. Attribution of a work to the artist and protection of the integrity of a work from alternation are historical bedrocks of artistic protections, but those protections have been diminished for digital artists. The Visual Artists Rights Act excludes digital works from the definition of works of visual art, thus excluding these works from rights of attribution and integrity. At the time, rights of attribution and integrity were seen as quasi-trademark rights, and artists were protected under the Lanham Act. Since then, however, the Supreme Court has extended copyright’s preemption over trademark, undermining an artist’s ability to have non-contractual protections for the artist’s identity and integrity in a work. In addition, a second trend within the digital environment has created additional tensions for artists whose works include celebrities, athletes, or other members of the public. The Supreme Court has made the clear determination that video games are entitled to complete First Amendment protection, placing those works in the same category as film, publishing, and works of art. Despite this free speech protection to the medium, a series of inconsistent decisions among state and federal courts have made unclear when the use of a person’s likeness in a video game—or video art instillation—would constitute a violation of the person’s rights of publicity.

Coordinating Adjudication Processes

International investment tribunals, like all other international courts and tribunals, are created equal. This chapter focuses on genuine decisional fragmentation and the coordination of proceedings within the investment treaty regime, i.e. between parallel and subsequent investment arbitrations rather than cross-regime coordination of, for example, investment arbitrations and World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement. Decisional fragmentation refers to divergent rulings in cases that share the same factual matrix. Numerous authors posit that inconsistent decisions are a particular risk in investment arbitration given the lack of internal (e.g. stare decisis) as well as external control mechanisms to ensure uniform arbitral decisions. The chapter examines what coordination tasks arise in international investment law (IIL), what the stakeholder interests related to these coordination tasks are and how overlapping jurisdictions of investment tribunals can be managed institutionally and procedurally. The distinction between jurisdiction and admissibility is an important element of successfully coordinating parallel investment arbitrations. The major advantage of declaring claims inadmissible is that it allows tribunals to fulfil their jurisdictional mandate – which many investments tribunals are keen to do – while coordinating proceedings through the lever of admissibility. After describing the structural features of IIL, and in particular the absence of stare decisis, Section 2 examines three coordination tasks that arise in IIL: related proceedings, mass claims and derivative shareholder claims.

Debunking Douglas: The Case Against Writing Both Majority and Minority Opinions

Debunking Douglas: The Case Against Writing Both Majority and Minority Opinions CRAIG ALAN SMITH Introduction In the annals of Supreme Court history, Meyer v. United States was hardly notewor­ thy. Decided by a six to three majority and announced in late November 1960, the case by all appearances was a run-of-the-mill federal tax question involving a disputed marital deduction on estate taxes paid.1 Although treated favorably by Shepard's citations, Meyer did not become a significant precedent, and no one outside the parties involved, their lawyers, or the Justices (at least, for a few weeks) paid any attention to it. Not so for the legacies ofJustices Charles Evans Whittaker and William O. Douglas. Although Whittaker was the second person ever to serve at all three levels of the federal judiciary,2 he was still rated a judicial “failure” by sixty-five legal and political experts in a 1971 survey.3 The only Missou­ rian and first native Kansan appointed to the Supreme Court, Whittaker’s five years of service were routinely dismissed as ineffec­ tive or insignificant. Shortly after Whittaker’s resignation, Leon Friedman prepared a bio­ graphical sketch portraying him as “not fitted intellectually or physically for the job.” Relying on Friedman, Victoria Woeste con­ cluded Whittaker “was in eveiy way unsuited for his exalted position.”4 Criticized for making inconsistent decisions, struggling with making decisions (or changing his mind once he made a decision), Whittaker’s weakened reputation was further tarnished when he (supposedly) failed to write the majority opinion assigned to him in Meyer v. United States. William O. Douglas, on the other hand, was the longest serving Justice in history. His feats were truly remarkable, often controver­ sial, and some were arguably unbelievable. Touted more than once as a vice presidential candidate while on the Bench (each time unsuccessfully), Douglas left an indelible stamp on Supreme Court history with his 228 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY four marriages (a couple to women less than half his age), several calls for his impeach­ ment, wide-ranging publications based on his world travels, and nearly being killed when the horse he was riding fell on him.5 Stories of Douglas’s youth hiking through western mountains to overcome polio seemed fabled, and, according to one Douglas biographer, they probably were.6 Even Douglas’s rela­ tions with his law clerks contributed to recent debates over just how cruel a taskmaster he really was.7 Setting aside the hype, however, there was one Douglas legend that for over thirty years became so commonplace as to scarcely need attribution. According to Douglas himself, he wrote the Court opinion and the dissenting opinion in Meyer v. United States. Considering Douglas’s prodigious work out­ put and Meyer's relative obscurity, this claim was accepted by at least a dozen different authors as evidence of another memorable act in Douglas’s long list ofaccomplishments. As Supreme Court historical trivia, the story of how one Justice wrote the majority and minority decisions in the same case was repeated and regaled. Unfortunately, none of it was true; Douglas embellished it beyond credulity. More tragic, though, than the gullibility ofscores ofDouglas commentators was the irreparable damage this innocuous story did to Whittaker’s reputation once he became the unwitting buffoon of another Douglas tall tale. This article analyzes the persistency of Douglas’s story and presents how various sources (including Douglas) used it to perpetuate his legacy while denigrating Whittaker. This textual analysis reveals inconsistencies with other factual circum­ stances that made Douglas’s story all the more suspect. While the earliest sources who believed Douglas could be excused their naivete, later sources were guilty of inexcus­ able laxness for preserving such a preposter­ ous story without verification (even Douglas related inaccurate facts). It was more conve­ nient—some might say plausible—to cast Douglas as the genius behind two written opinions and Whittaker as the incapable rube who needed assistance. The truth found in the historical record (hidden in plain sight for thirty years) proved far more revealing for both men’s characters. Not only was Dou­ glas’s story untrue, but the truth cast Whittaker in a more positive...

Pessimistic rough set based decisions: A multigranulation fusion strategy

Multigranulation rough sets (MGRS) is one of desirable directions in rough set theory, in which lower/upper approximations are approximated by granular structures induced by multiple binary relations. It provides a new perspective for decision making analysis based on rough set theory. In decision making analysis, people often adopt the decision strategy “Seeking common ground while eliminating differences” (SCED). This strategy implies that one reserves common decisions while deleting inconsistent decisions. From this point of view, the objective of this study is to develop a new multigranulation rough set based decision model based on SCED strategy, called pessimistic multigranulation rough sets. We study this model from three aspects, which are lower/upper approximation and their properties, decision rules and attribute reduction, in this paper.

Critical Analysis of Assessment Studies of the Animal Ethics Review Process.

Simple SummaryIn many countries, the approval of animal research projects depends on the decisions of the ethics committees which review the projects. Since the efficiency of the protection of experimental animals greatly depends on the performance of the ethics committees, its regular assessment is crucial. This paper reviews the results of studies assessing the performance of the ethics committees, and emphasizes the importance of outcome assessment in the evaluation of the performance of ethics committees.In many countries the approval of animal research projects depends on the decisions of Animal Ethics Committees (AEC’s), which review the projects. An animal ethics review is performed as part of the authorization process and therefore performed routinely, but comprehensive information about how well the review system works is not available. This paper reviews studies that assess the performance of animal ethics committees by using Donabedian’s structure-process-outcome model. The paper points out that it is well recognised that AECs differ in structure, in their decision-making methods, in the time they take to review proposals and that they also make inconsistent decisions. On the other hand, we know little about the quality of outcomes, and to what extent decisions have been incorporated into daily scientific activity, and we know almost nothing about how well AECs work from the animal protection point of view. In order to emphasise this viewpoint in the assessment of AECs, the paper provides an example of measures for outcome assessment. The animal suffering is considered as a potential measure for outcome assessment of the ethics review. Although this approach has limitations, outcome assessment would significantly increase our understanding of the performance of AECs.

Help Me Help You: Why Congress's Attempt to Cover Torts Committed by Indian Tribal Contractors with the FTCA Hurts the Government and the Tribes

Since the Nixon Administration, the U.S. government has attempted to promote tribal self-determination among Native Americans. Under the Indian Self-Determination Act, the tribes can enter into agreements with the federal government to take over services previously provided to the tribes by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). By entering into these contracts, the tribes have been able to administer a wide variety of services, including construction and law enforcement, which bring income and employment to Indian country. These contracts do not always run smoothly, however, and sometimes people get injured. Under a series of amendments to the Indian Self-Determination Act, when tribal contractors commit torts, the federal government steps in and defends the tribal contractors under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) as if they were employees of the government. The government pays out any settlements or judgments from the Judgment Fund. This scenario is a complete departure from the traditional FTCA rule whereby contractors are only treated as government employees in exceedingly limited circumstances.In hastily extending the FTCA to cover tribal contractors, Congress contravened FTCA jurisprudence in theory and in practice. Congress intended to help the tribes avoid having to buy costly insurance by directly assuming liability under the FTCA. While perhaps well-intentioned, the result is a system of perverse incentives and a string of inconsistent decisions. Courts struggle to apply the FTCA's waiver of the federal government's sovereign immunity to the tribes, which remain separate sovereigns that retain some of their own sovereign immunity. The arrangement also creates problems in determining whether tribal contractors are within the scope of their employment and undertaking discretionary functions. Furthermore, the statutory scheme creates the potential for tribal law to govern the United States' tort liability and may have inadvertently created a loophole for the intentional torts of tribal law enforcement officers. The end result of this untenable situation is that savvy tribes recognize the unpredictability of the FTCA protection and purchase private insurance anyway, sometimes with federal contract support funds. This is the exact result Congress hoped to avoid.Congress should end the experiment of extending the FTCA to cover tribal contractors and replace it with subsidized private insurance. This new arrangement would simplify the process for potential claimants and keep the government from having to pay the duplicative costs of insurance and judgments.