Adversarial Bias and Court-Appointed Experts in Litigation

We provide a simple framework in which the level of adversarial bias is endogenously determined in a litigation process. Using this model, we study the effect of using a court-appointed expert on the level of adversarial bias and the average error rates, and find an interesting trade-off: although the judge can reduce the number of mistakes at trial by consulting a court-appointed expert, litigants choose to hire a biased expert more frequently in response, which increases the level of adversarial bias, thereby inducing evidence distortion more often