Science in the Courtroom: Vital to Best Interests and Reasonable Efforts

This essay was adapted from a speech presented by the author on February 12, 2008 at a Colloquium entitled “What's Best for Children? How Judges Use Neuroscience to Break the Cycle of Child Maltreatment.” The colloquium was sponsored by the Harvard Center on the Developing Child and held at Harvard Law School. It focuses on the wealth of knowledge that has been discovered about infant and child development and the importance of incorporating that knowledge into judicial decision making in child maltreatment cases.     

Family‐Centered Practice in Florida: Family Court Actions and Perceptions

Family and dependency courts can become valuable partners in efforts to stem the tide of child maltreatment using a family‐centered strategy. Florida's response to a 2008 federal Child and Family Services Review included a commitment to implement family‐centered practice in child protection services and the courts that hear these cases. Evidence of this implementation was documented in a formative evaluation conducted in 2010 and 2011. Findings based on interviews with dependency judges, Children's Legal Services attorneys, and Guardian ad Litem volunteers provide useful insights on how these practices were perceived and implemented.     

Ambiguous political power and contest efforts

When there is incomplete information on the source of power in a contest, the contestants may divide their lobbying efforts between the potential centers of power, only one of which determines the contests’ winning probabilities. Our analysis focuses on the effect of ambiguity regarding the source of power on the contestants’ aggregate effort in a symmetric, simple lottery contest with two potential centers of power. Specifically, we examine the effects of varying the informativeness of the contestants’ private signals (i.e., the probability that a signal is correct) and the degree of correlation between them. Our benchmark case is the standard Tullock’s model, in which the source of power is known, i.e., the contestants’ signals are perfectly informative. We show that the level of aggregate effort in this case is reached also when the signals are perfectly uninformative. However, in any intermediate case the contestants’ aggregate effort is lower, provided that the signals are not perfectly correlated. In other words, there is a U-shape relationship between the informativeness of the signals and the aggregate effort in the contest. The lowest level of effort is spent when the signals are independent and the probability that a signal is true is about 0.85. In this case, efforts are reduced by about one-fifth in comparison with the benchmark case: from a rent dissipation of 50% to slightly over 40%.     

Stakes and Welfare in Rent-Seeking Contests

Using a public-policy application ofTullock's two-player rent-seeking contest,this paper focuses on the relationshipbetween the aggregate expected utility ofthe players and their asymmetricvaluations. In our game these valuationsare the players' payoffs in the twopossible states of nature, namely, theapproval and rejection of the proposedpublic policy. Our main result provides thecondition that ensures that the aggregateexpected payoff of the two contestants (theinterest groups that compete on theapproval of the proposed policy) is positively related to the valuationparameters.     

Investment Criteria in Single and Multi-Member Economic Organizations

This paper compares the determination of investment criteriain single- and multi-member organizations. Individualdecisional skills are assumed to be endogenous variables thatdepend on the investment criteria. Our main result specifiesthe condition that determines the relationship between theinvestment criteria in single- and multi-member organizations,given the size of the multi-member organization, the decisionrule it applies and the function relating the individual'sdecisional skills to the investment criterion. Theimplications of our main result are developed for specialorganizations such as hierarchies and polyarchies. Ouranalysis implies that the criteria in a multi-memberorganization may be stricter than the criteria set in asingle-member organization, even though in the former case theorganization may worsen the average decision-making ability ofits members. The analysis can be applied not only in singleand multi-member decision making settings, but also in somecontexts of centralized and decentralized decisions. This isillustrated in the case of decisions by editors ofprofessional journals regarding the acceptance or rejection ofsubmitted papers.     

Efforts in two-sided contests

The degree of rent dissipation is studied in extended two-sided contests that involve two types of efforts. While usual contestants expend resources in trying to win the contested prize, potential recipients of the rent-seeking efforts also participate in the contest. This is due to uncertainty regarding the source of power in the contest that induces the bureaucrats to expend resources to increase their share in the rent-seeking efforts by trying to appear as the party controlling the allocation of the prize. We show that the existing theoretical and empirical studies are incomplete and may underestimate the extent of rent dissipation.     

Performance and prize decomposition in contests

This paper focuses on the effect of additive contest decomposition on performance: winning probabilities and efforts of the contestants. Our main result provides a sufficient condition for invariance of contest performance to the decomposition of a contest, when the sum of the possibly differently valued prizes in the segmented contests is equal to the value of the prize in the original grand contest and the relative prizes in the sub-contests are equal for every contestant. It is shown that this condition is satisfied by the commonly used exponential logistic contest success functions. With these functions the contest designer does not have an incentive to split the prize and create additive, segmented sub-contests. We then prove that when the additive contest decomposition is asymmetric, contest decomposition may adversely affect the designer; that it, reduce the total efforts of the contestants.     

Sandler, Freedman and Telhami: Religion in Israeli Politics The Religious-Secular Divide in Israeli Politics

The following is the edited text of a Sadat Forum held at the Brookings Institution on February 23, 1999. The cosponsors are the Brookings Foreign Policy Program and the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland.