Affiliation Bias in Arbitration: An Experimental Approach

Sergio Puig, Associate Professor at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, and Anton Strezhnev, PhD candidate in the Department of Government at Harvard University, have published a thought-provoking article entitled “Affiliation Bias in Arbitration: An Experimental Approach,” Arizona Legal Studies Discussion Paper No. 16-31.  In their paper, the authors examine party appointed arbitrator bias.

Here is the abstract:

A characteristic feature of arbitration, a growing form of dispute settlement, is that each disputing party appoints an arbitrator. Commentators, however, suggest that party appointed arbitrators tend to be ‘biased’. Evaluating this claim from data on historical disputes is problematic due to non-random selection of arbitrators. Here, we use a novel experimental approach to estimate the causal effect of party-appointments. Using a new dataset of 266 participants around the world we confirm that professional arbitrators suffer from affiliation effects — a cognitive predisposition to favor the appointing party. At a methodological level, we offer a solution to the problem of measuring affiliation effects in a world confounded by selection effects.

This and other scholarly publications written by Professor Puig and Mr. Strezhnev may be downloaded from the Social Science Research Network.

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