1,721,059 research outputs found
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Machine Learning and the Reliability of Adjudication
Full text linkMachine learning can be used to help guide and regulate adjudicator decisions, increasing the reliability and overall quality of decision making. The first chapter provides an analytic and normative overview of what I refer to as ``statistical precedent." It explains how statistical models of previous decisions can help assess and improve the reliability of an adjudication system. The subsequent chapters elaborate on and empirically illustrate two of the techniques introduced in the first chapter. Chapter two, using an original dataset of Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decisions, presents a method for estimating the amount of inter-judge disagreement. Chapter three, using an original dataset of California parole hearings, demonstrates the potential of synthetically crowdsourced decision making
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The Private Enforcement of Government Interests Under the False Claims Act
Full text linkFraud against the federal government can be extremely costly, as the Department of Health and Human Services estimated it made 18 billion as of 2010.Private enforcement has a long history under the common law tradition, but its role in a the modern, public enforcement state is less certain. The False Claims Act's private enforcement system, known as its qui tam provisions, specifies government review of private actions in an attempt to curtail past abuses.In the first part of this dissertation, I evaluate the role of private enforcers and their attorneys in this qui tam system. The government review process allows a standardized reference point for comparing private performance. I argue that it also provides private actors the opportunity to slack by pursuing a “filing mill” strategy. From the data available, however, I do not find law firms aggressively submitting cases under such a high volume, low effort strategy. Rather, law firms and the government appear to be cooperating as intended under the statutory design.In the second piece of this dissertation, I address the question of the optimal bounty percentage for a finder's fee in the False Claims Act. The statute current specifies a minimum 15% bounty for information leading to a successful prosecution of fraud. I consider the responsiveness of private enforcers to variation in the bounty percentage. Using variation from a 2004 change in the tax code, I find evidence that private enforcers are more willing to bring new cases valued under $440,000 given an approximate 23% increase in bounty.For the final piece of this dissertation, I consider the bounty percentage for private litigation in the qui tam process. Unlike the finder's fee bounty, I suggest that a 100% litigation bounty may be useful for both compensatory and deterrence purposes. Although a government agency concerned about compensation for fraud losses might initially be concerned about granting a 100% litigation bounty, I argue that the threat of such a litigation bounty may result in additional compensation. The Department of Justice should have the discretionary power to grant high litigation bounties
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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Political Diversity and the Legal Academy: Three Empirical Studies
Full text linkLaw and politics are inseparably connected, with numerous studies showing that politics plays an influential role in legal decision-making. And law schools primarily exist to transmit and produce knowledge. So the political demographics of the legal academia has the potential to significantly influence the production of legal knowledge in the United States. Yet while previous studies have shown that the political demographics of the legal academy tilt strongly in one direction, no one has yet sought to understand what some of the mechanisms might be that cause this disparity. Further, no one has attempted to document the production of knowledge in an increasingly partisan area of the law: religion.This dissertation aims to begin filling those gaps. It does so through three empirical studies. The first tests several hypotheses as to why there are so few conservative or libertarian law professors: the Brain Hypothesis (lack of intellectual ability), the Greed Hypothesis (a desire for better paying jobs than academia), the Interest Hypotheses (a lack of interest in academic pursuits), and the Discrimination Hypothesis (discrimination based on political orientation). It does so by examining the publication and citation rates of law professors at the 16 highest-ranked law schools in the country. Using statistical matching techniques, the study examines a unique dataset to find that conservative/libertarian professors publish and are cited at nearly double the rate as their peers, a statistically significant difference. These findings are more consistent with a story of discrimination than the other potential hypotheses.The second study leverages models of discrimination developed by Gary Becker and Kenneth Arrow to measure the “rank gap” in law school hiring based on political orientation discrimination. The study draws on a unique of all newly-hired law professors from 2001-2010, and finds, using statistical matching techniques, that conservative/libertarian law professors are hired law schools averaging 12-13 ranks lower (i.e., less prestigious) than their liberal peers, after controlling for other predictors of the ranking of the law school one is initially hired at.Finally, the third study examines in a type of quantitative intellectual history the portrayal, or treatment, of religion in legal scholarship over a watershed 15-year period as relates to religion in American law, politics and society: 1998-2012. The study finds that religion is increasingly treated as something that is problematic, as compared to something positive, that not all religions are treated the same with some getting more favorable treatment in legal scholarship than others
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New Approaches to Old Questions in Intellectual Property
No full textThis dissertation presents three empirical studies of the American intellectual property system.In the first chapter, my coauthors and I explore the extent to which copyright’s incentive function is aligned with the economic realities of the commercial music industry. Using a novel panel dataset of music sales and streams, we find that that most commercial music—even blockbuster releases—has an extremely short commercial “half-life.”In the second, I investigate the predictability of patent litigation, the outcome of which is typically thought to be difficult to forecast. Using a computational model of the text of asserted patent claims and other characteristics of the patent and litigation, I find that decisions about patent validity are more predictable than previously recognized.Finally, I replicate several leading descriptive studies of patent litigation, and find that their substantive conclusions are sensitive to coding choices and the period over which the sample is drawn
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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