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This Working Paper provides a framework for understanding how blinding may be a solution for institutional corruption, a situation where a funding dependency causes biased outcomes and thus a lack of trust. A funding dependency can be disaggregated into three functions: a subsidy, a selection of the decision maker, and an identification between the funder and the decision maker. These dynamics are shown in the settings of litigation witnesses, biomedical scientists, and candidates for public offices, all of whom may be biased by funding dependencies. Drawing from a long history of blinding in the biomedical sciences, blinding operates by allowing the subsidy function, while eliminating the selection and identification functions, which cause bias. In some settings, even the funders themselves will have self-interested reasons to prefer blinding over the status quo, which suggests the potential for market-based solutions to institutional corruption. Blinding is motivated by a recognition that a subsidy-dependency is sometimes unavoidable for practical reasons (including constitutional, political, economic realities), making a ban on conflicting interests unattainable. Blinding is also motivated by a recognition that other solutions to institutional corruption, such as professionalism and mandatory disclosure of conflicting interests, require strong assumptions about psychological capacities, which often fail. Blinding has its own limitations: some biasing functions cannot be disaggregated from the subsidy, and even if blinding works to eliminate bias, it may fail to rescue a dependent institution from perceptions of illegitimacy. Still, blinding should be understood as a primary tool in the fight against institutional corruption. The Working Paper concludes by showing how blinding strategies are a primary mechanism of the civil and criminal jury trial institution, which suggests other similar applications to minimize bias in other institutions.
What information should jurors have during court proceedings to render a just decision? Should politicians know who is donating money to their campaigns? Will scientists draw biased conclusions about drug efficacy when they know more about the patient or study population? The potential for bias in decision-making by physicians, lawyers, politicians, and scientists has been recognized for hundreds of years and drawn attention from media and scholars seeking to understand the role that conflicts of interests and other psychological processes play. However, commonly proposed solutions to biased decision-making, such as transparency (disclosing conflicts) or exclusion (avoiding conflicts) do not directly solve the underlying problem of bias and may have unintended consequences. Robertson and Kesselheim bring together a renowned group of interdisciplinary scholars to consider another way to reduce the risk of biased decision-making: blinding. What are the advantages and limitations of blinding? How can we quantify the biases in unblinded research? Can we develop new ways to blind decision-makers? What are the ethical problems with withholding information from decision-makers in the course of blinding? How can blinding be adapted to legal and scientific procedures and in institutions not previously open to this approach? Fundamentally, these sorts of questions—about who needs to know what—open new doors of inquiry for the design of scientific research studies, regulatory institutions, and courts. The volume surveys the theory, practice, and future of blinding, drawing upon leading authors with a diverse range of methodologies and areas of expertise, including forensic sciences, medicine, law, philosophy, economics, psychology, sociology, and statistics. - Introduces readers to the primary policy issue this book seeks to address: biased decision-making. - Provides a focus on blinding as a solution to bias, which has applicability in many domains. - Traces the development of blinding as a solution to bias, and explores the different ways blinding has been employed. - Includes case studies to explore particular uses of blinding for statisticians, radiologists, and fingerprint examiners, and whether the jurors and judges who rely upon them will value and understand blinding.
An analysis of “the Trump era, but not about Trump. . . . but on how incentives across a range of institutions have created corruption” (New York Times Book Review). “There is not a single American awake to the world who is comfortable with the way things are.” So begins Lawrence Lessig's sweeping indictment of modern-day American institutions and the corruption that besets them—from the selling of Congress to special interests to the corporate capture of the academy. And it’s our fault. What Lessig brilliantly shows is that we can’t blame the problems of contemporary American life on bad people, as our discourse all too often tends to do. Rather, he explains, “We have allowed core institutions of America’s economic, social, and political life to become corrupted. Not by evil souls, but by good souls. Not through crime, but through compromise.” Through case studies of Congress, finance, the academy, the media, and the law, Lessig shows how institutions are drawn away from higher purposes and toward money, power, quick rewards—the first steps to corruption. Lessig knows that a charge so broad should not be levied lightly, and that our instinct will be to resist it. So he brings copious detail gleaned from years of research, building a case that is all but incontrovertible: America is on the wrong path. If we don’t acknowledge our own part in that, and act now to change it, we will hand our children a less perfect union than we were given. It will be a long struggle. This book represents the first steps. “A devastating argument that America is racing for the cliff's edge of structural, possibly irreversible tyranny.” —Cory Doctorow
Psychiatry Under the Influence investigates the actions and practices of the American Psychiatric Association and academic psychiatry in the United States, and presents it as a case study of institutional corruption.
Recent research demonstrates that the quality of public institutions is crucial for a number of important environmental, social, economic, and political outcomes, and thereby human well-being. The Quality of Government (QoG) approach directs attention to issues such as impartiality in the exercise of public power, professionalism in public service delivery, effective measures against corruption, and meritocracy instead of patronage and nepotism. This Handbook offers a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of this rapidly expanding research field and also identifies viable avenues for future research. The initial chapters focus on theoretical approaches and debates, and the central question of how QoG can be measured. A second set of chapters examines the wealth of empirical research on how QoG relates to democratization, social trust and cohesion, ethnic diversity, happiness and human wellbeing, democratic accountability, economic growth and inequality, political legitimacy, environmental sustainability, gender equality, and the outbreak of civil conflicts. The remaining chapters turn to the perennial issue of which contextual factors and policy approaches—national, local, and international—have proven successful (and not so successful) for increasing QoG. The Quality of Government approach both challenges and complements important strands of inquiry in the social sciences. For research about democratization, QoG adds the importance of taking state capacity into account. For economics, the QoG approach shows that in order to produce economic prosperity, markets need to be embedded in institutions with a certain set of qualities. For development studies, QoG emphasizes that issues relating to corruption are integral to understanding development writ large.
Roger Koppl develops a theory of experts and expert failure, and illustrates his theory with wide-ranging examples, including that of state regulation of economic activity.
This book focuses on the role of norms in the description, explanation, prediction and combat of corruption. It conceives corruption as a ubiquitous problem, constructed by specific traditions, values, norms and institutions. The chapters concentrate on the relationship between corruption and social as well as legal norms, providing comparative perspectives from different academic disciplines, theoretical and methodological backgrounds, and various country-studies. Due to the nature of social norms that are embedded in personal, local, and organizational contexts, the contributions in the volume focus in particular on the individual and institutional level of analysis (micro and meso-mechanisms). The book will be of interest to students and scholars across the fields of political science, public administration, socio-legal studies and psychology.
This timely Handbook unpacks the underlying common factors that give rise to corrupting environments. Investigating opportunities to deliver ethical public policy, it explores global trends in public administration and its vulnerability to corruption today, as well as proposing strategies for building integrity and diminishing corruption in public sectors around the globe.
This book argues that overcoming people's inability to recognize their own wrongdoing is the most important but regrettably neglected area of the behavioral approach to law.
A sharp exposé of the roots of the cost-exposure consensus in American health care that shows how the next wave of reform can secure real access and efficiency. The toxic battle over how to reshape American health care has overshadowed the underlying bipartisan agreement that health insurance coverage should be incomplete. Both Democrats and Republicans expect patients to bear a substantial portion of health care costs through deductibles, copayments, and coinsurance. In theory this strategy empowers patients to make cost-benefit tradeoffs, encourages thrift and efficiency in a system rife with waste, and defends against the moral hazard that can arise from insurance. But in fact, as Christopher T. Robertson reveals, this cost-exposure consensus keeps people from valuable care, causes widespread anxiety, and drives many patients and their families into bankruptcy and foreclosure. Marshalling a decade of research, Exposed offers an alternative framework that takes us back to the core purpose of insurance: pooling resources to provide individuals access to care that would otherwise be unaffordable. Robertson shows how the cost-exposure consensus has changed the meaning and experience of health care and exchanged one form of moral hazard for another. He also provides avenues of reform. If cost exposure remains a primary strategy, physicians, hospitals, and other providers must be held legally responsible for communicating those costs to patients, and insurance companies should scale cost exposure to individuals’ ability to pay. New and more promising models are on the horizon, if only we would let go our misguided embrace of incomplete insurance.