TY  - JOUR
AU  - Shavell,Steven
TI  - The Appeals Process and Adjudicator Incentives
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 10754
PY  - 2004
Y2  - September 2004
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10754
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10754.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Steven Shavell
Harvard Law School
1575 Massachusetts Avenue
Hauser Hall 508
Cambridge, MA  02138
Tel: 617/495-3668
Fax: 617/496-2256
E-Mail: shavell@law.harvard.edu
AB  - The appeals process -- whereby litigants can have decisions of adjudicators reviewed by a higher authority -- is a general feature of formal legal systems (and of many private decisionmaking procedures). It leads to the making of better decisions, because it constitutes a threat to adjudicators whose decisions would deviate too much from socially desirable ones. Further, it yields this benefit without absorbing resources to the extent that adjudicators can anticipate when appeals would occur and would thus make decisions to forestall the actual occurrence of appeals.
ER  -