Dueling experts and imperfect verification

In the Dueling Experts Game, adversarial experts strategically produce “good” or “bad” evidence to support their partisan testimony. Good evidence is probative while bad evidence has no evidentiary value. The new feature of this Game is that Judge sometimes erroneously identifies good evidence as bad evidence and vice versa. Along the Game’s equilibrium path, each partisan expert produces only good evidence if it supports his side. When favorable good evidence is unavailable, an expert produces bad evidence to support his testimony. Hence, dueling experts always contradict one another. Despite their conflicting testimony, one of the experts invariably produces the available good evidence for Judge. Therefore, Judge always receives the available good evidence. A central result is that the quality of experts, including their ability to persuade judges using available good evidence, and the quality of judges – their ability to distinguish good from bad evidence – determine the accuracy of verdicts. Remarkably, the likelihood that experts are endowed with good evidence does not matter provided that this likelihood is not identically zero or one.     

Freedom of expression in commerce

Does commercial speech deserve the same freedom from governmental interference as do noncommercial forms of expression? Examination of this question forces a reappraisal of the grounds upon which freedom of expression rests. I urge an analysis of those grounds which founds freedom of speech upon the requirements of individual autonomy over against society. I then apply the autonomy analysis to commercial expression by examining the empirical features which distinguish commercial forms of expression. Some such features - e.g., “triviality” — have been cited by others as justification for limiting the freedom accorded commercial speech, but I reject the power of those features to limit freedom of expression. Instead, I identify three features of commercial expression which are relevant to the task: resiliency (coupled with potential for abuse), action-orientation, and intimate connection with conventional commercial structures. I discuss the implications of these features for legitimizing governmental restriction of freedom in commercial expression, with the general conclusion that such restriction must be more severely limited than is commonly thought.     

Cambodia: A Shattered Society,by Marie Alexandrine Martin

Abstract

Written by the research director of the Centre national de la Recherche scientifique in Paris, Cambodia: A Shattered Society is an updated and revised version of a book first published in France in 1989.