Court-appointed experts and accuracy in adversarial litigation

Concerned about distortion of evidence arising from litigants’ strong incentive to misrepresent information provided to fact-finders, legal scholars and commentators have long suggested that courts appoint their own advisors for neutral information regarding disputes. This paper examines the litigants’ problem of losing incentive to provide information when judges seek the advice of court-appointed experts. Within a standard litigation-game framework, we find that assigning court-appointed experts involves a trade-off: although such experts help judges obtain more information overall, thereby reducing the number of errors during trials, they weaken litigants’ incentive to supply expert information, thus undermining the adversarial nature of the current American legal system.