The Effect of Social Sanctions on Judges: Concealing Underperformance

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.