Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-2025

Journal Title

Review of Law & Economics

ISSN

1555-5879

DOI

10.1515/rle-2024-0117

Abstract

Real-time review systems are frequently used in various sports to monitor the decisions of referees and correct their mistakes. Interventions through these systems cause delays in games, which are perceived as being costly. This makes it optimal for these review systems to interfere with the decisions of the referee less frequently than would minimize the costs of decision errors, which I formalize through an analysis of the VAR system in football. This analysis also reveals that optimal review standards ought to be laxer when an important event (e.g., a goal) occurs between the position in which the potential error took place and the VAR intervention. In the near future, it may be possible to introduce similar review systems in the law enforcement context, e.g., by utilizing police officers’ body cameras. I compare optimal intervention standards in this context to their analogues in the sports context, and discuss implications.

First Page

1

Last Page

17

Num Pages

17

Publisher

De Gruyter

Rights

© 2025 the author(s), published by De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

File Type

PDF

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.