"When are Judges and Bureaucrats Left Independent? Theory and History from Imperial Japan, Postwar Japan, and the United States"

This is one chapter from the book, Judicial Independence: Economic Theory and Japanese Empirics, that Mark Ramseyer and Eric Rasmusen are writing. In preceding chapters we explain the institutions of modern Japan's judiciary and use regression analysis to test whether judges who rule in ways the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (the LDP) disliked were penalized in their careers. We find that they were for some kinds of cases\involving such things as the constitutionality of the military, injunctions against the national (but not local) government, reapportionment, and electioneering laws. They were not penalized for other kinds of cases\tax and criminal cases. Those results are drawn from our earlier published papers, reorganized and synthesized for the present book. This chapter does not draw on our published work. It asks why the degree and type of independence of judges in modern Japan is different from that of other civil servants. In particular, we compare judges in modern Japan, pre-war Japan, and the United States; and we compare judges with other kinds of public employees, asking why they are not elected and why they are not directly under the control of politicians.

"Starategic Implications of Uncertainty Over One's Own Private Value in Auctions"

Bidders have to decide whether and when to incur the cost of estimating their own values in auctions. This can explain sniping - flurries of bids late in auctions with deadlines - as the result of bidders trying to avoid stimulating other bidders into examining their bid ceiling more carefully.

The Case for Managed Judges: Learning from Japan after the Political Upheaval of 1993

Although the executive branch appoints Japanese Supreme Court justices as it does in the United States, a personnel office under the control of the Supreme Court rotates lower court Japanese judges through a variety of posts. This creates the possibility that politicians might indirectly use the postings to reward or punish judges. For forty years, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) controlled the legislature and appointed the Supreme Court justices who in turn controlled the careers of these lower-court judges. In 1993, it temporarily lost control. We use regression analysis to examine whether the end of the LDP's electoral lock changed the court's promotion system, and find surprisingly little change. Whether before or after 1993, the Supreme Court used the personnel office to 'manage' the careers of lower court judges. The result: uniform and predictable judgments that economize on litigation costs by facilitating out-of-court settlements

Creating and Enforcing Norms, with Special Reference to Sanctions

Two central puzzles about social norms are how they are enforced and how they are created or modified. The sanctions for the violation of a norm can be categorized as automatic, guilt, shame, informational, bilateral costly, and multilateral costly. The choice of sanction is related to problems in creating and modifying norms. We use our analysis of the creation, modification, and enforcement of norms to analyze the scope of feasible government action either to promote desirable norms or to repress undesirable ones. We conclude that the difficulty of predicting the effect of such action limits its feasible scope

Competing For Loyalty: The Dynamics of Rallying Support

We consider a class of dynamic collective action problems in which either a single principal or two competing principals vie for the support of members of a group. We focus on the dynamic problem that emerges when agents negotiate and commit their support to principals sequentially. A danger for the agents in this context is that a principal may be able to succeed by exploiting competition among members of the group. Would agents benefit from introducing competition between opposing principals? We show that when principals? policies provide value to the agents, competition actually reduces agents? welfare

Goal: 5000-7500 words Currently: 6,465 words (including everything) Exclusive Dealing: Before Bork, and Beyond

Abstract: Antitrust scholars have come to accept the basic ideas about exclusive dealing that Bork articulated in The Antitrust Paradox. Indeed, they have even extended his list of reasons why exclusive dealing can promote economic efficiency. Yet they have also taken up his challenge to explain how exclusive dealing could possibly cause harm, and have modelled a variety of special cases where it does. Some (albeit not all) of these are sufficiently plausible to be useful to prosecutors and judges