Abstract How do judges respond to social sanctions related to judicial inefficiency? This paper shows that social sanctions may lead judges to conceal their underperformance, rather than improve their performance. I focus on the Supreme Court of Israel where court decisions prominently display the hearing date, making delays in issuing decisions salient. Using hand-coded data, I show that hearing dates are more likely to be missing from court decisions when those decisions are delayed, consistent with strategic concealment of delays. I use the unique setting to argue that this behavior is driven by judges’ concerns about their reputation within the wider legal community. Leveraging a natural experiment that publicly exposed this concealment strategy, I show that the practice largely disappeared following the exposure. Finally, I present suggestive evidence that the ability to conceal delays contributed to longer decision times. These findings highlight an unintended consequence of reputational sanctions: when performance is imperfectly observable, they may induce concealment rather than improvement.
Yehonatan Givati (Mon,) studied this question.