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Speculator bias; Judges; Experimental law and economics
Abstract:
Historically, people have often expressed negative feelings toward speculators, a
sentiment that might have even been reinforced since the latest financial crisis, dur-
ing which taxpayer money was warranted or spent to bail out reckless investors. In
this paper, we conjecture that judges may also have anti-speculator sentiment, which
might affect their professional decision making. We asked 123 professional law-
yers and 247 law students in Germany this question, and they clearly predicted that
judges would have an anti-speculator bias. However, in an actual behavioral study,
185 judges did not exhibit such bias. In another sample of 170 professional lawyers,
we found weak support for an anti-speculator bias. This evidence suggests that an
independent audience may actually perceive unbiased judgments as biased. While
the literature usually suggests that a communication problem exists between lawyers
and non-lawyers (i.e. between judges and the general public), we find that this prob-
lem can also exist within the legal community.
