Symmetry, Presumptions, and the Judges Design

Authors

• Murat C. Mungan, Texas A&M University School of LawFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-2026

Journal Title

PLoS One

ISSN

1932-6203

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0340446

Abstract

An instrumental variables approach called ‘the judges design’ used frequently in social sciences relies on an assumption called ‘average monotonicity’. This assumption pertains to how different judges’ (or other classifiers’) decision making processes relate to each other. Violations of it are hard to detect, which raises the importance of it being supported by a plausible theory. Decisions of judges who solve Bayesian decision problems violate average monotonicity as long as the signals they process are symmetric and they do not possess strong presumptions. This result is extended to cases where judge presumptions are symmetrically distributed and may include strong presumptions. The analysis reveals factors that can be considered while discussing the plausibility of an assumption made to identify causal effects whose violations are difficult to detect and has important policy implications.

First Page

1

Last Page

20

Num Pages

20

Volume Number

21

Issue Number

1

Publisher

PLOS

Rights

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Notes

An online version of this article is available at: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0340446

Recommended Citation

Murat C. Mungan, Symmetry, Presumptions, and the Judges Design, 21 PLoS One 1 (2026).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/facscholar/2349

File Type

PDF