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Summary. In 2014, TransCanada Corporation pushed for the construction of different pipeline projects, including Keystone XL in the United States and Energy East in Eastern Canada. In November 2014, five strategy documents detailing the communication campaign organized by the public relations firm Edelman to help TransCanada gain social support (and political approval) for Energy East were leaked (Edelman 2014). The documents call for a budget to recruit 35,000 “activists” supporting the project through “grassroots” advocacy by using social media, and especially by paying numerous bloggers and key opinion leaders to defend the interests of TransCanada Corp. The documents explain how to transform public opinion and the economic preferences of the population by creating the illusion that a mass-movement in favor of the pipeline existed. One of the five leaked documents even elucidates that it is necessary to take some lessons from the Keystone XL, where the industry mobilized a million activists and generated more than 500,000 proKeystone comments during the public comment period. As the leaked documents explain:It’s not just associations or advocacy groups building these programs in support of the industry. Companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and Halliburton (and many more) have all made key investments inbuilding permanent advocacy assets and programs to support their lobbying, outreach and policy efforts.

Summary. Investigates strategies for regulating inappropriate faculty consulting relationships. This was my Safra project.

Summary. There have been a number of high-profile cases of Congressional bribery over the years. This was especially true in the 109th House (2005-06), during which ranking members such as Tom DeLay, Bob Ney, and “Duke” Cunningham were indicted. Some members of Congress argue that these were just a “few bad apples,” but the public believes that Congress is more widely corrupt. We employ social network analysis to test which view is correct. We analyze comprehensive data on all members of the 109th House, including their roll call voting and receipts of Political Action Committee (PAC) contributions. Our results show that PAC donors had a significant influence on lawmaker voting across party—despite the fact that such influence is illegal under the Federal Bribery Statute. Accordingly, we find strong support for institutional corruption within Congress. Our findings challenge the traditional conceptualization of political bribery as an individual form of occupational crime, and we argue that it should instead be viewed as a state-corporate crime in its own right. We argue further that it can act as a facilitative process that enables other forms of state-corporate offending to occur, thereby causing social harm. The unique ability of social network analysis to treat relationships as a unit of analysis is central in these findings and conclusions. Hence, we contribute to the emerging trend of applying social network analysis in criminology by providing a new application to state-corporate offending.

Summary. Among the obstacles to developing geothermal resources in Indonesia, corruption linked to fuel subsidies and the permitting of forest areas looms large.

Summary. Voters are less likely to identify with a political party that has been associated with corruption.

Summary. Voters distinguish between scandals implicating a chief executive directly and those involving members of the government bureaucracy.

Summary. Like all physicians, radiologists in the United States are subject to frequent and costly medical malpractice claims. Legal scholars and physicians concur that the US civil justice system is neither precise nor accurate in determining whether malpractice has truly occurred in cases in which claims are made. Sometimes, this inaccuracy is driven by biases inherent in medical expert-witness opinions. For example, expert-witness testimony involving "missed" radiology findings can be negatively affected by several cognitive biases, such as contextual bias, hindsight bias, and outcome bias. Biases inherent in the US legal system, such as selection bias, compensation bias, and affiliation bias, also play important roles. Fortunately, many of these biases can be significantly mitigated or eliminated through the use of appropriate blinding techniques. This paper reviews the major works on expert-witness blinding in the legal scholarship and the radiology professional literature. Its purpose is to acquaint the reader with the evidence that unblinded expert-witness testimony is tainted by multiple sources of bias and to examine proposed strategies for addressing these biases through blinding.

Summary. In a recent symposium article (Expert Mining and Required Disclosure, 81 U Chi. L. Rev. 131 (2014)), Professor Jonah Gelbach discusses the problem that a litigant in the American adversarial system can consult multiple expert witnesses on a given question but only disclose the single most favorable opinion to the fact finder (a jury, judge, or arbitrator). He calls this the problem of “expert mining.” In particular, Gelbach considers whether a policy that requires litigants to disclose to the fact finder the number of experts that they consulted might be a satisfactory solution to the problem. Alternatively, Gelbach considers whether an even more radical change to the American litigation system — the exclusion of all expert opinions rendered after the first one — might be necessary. In doing so, Gelbach extensively discusses my own work on this problem and the third solution I developed in a 2010 article, Blind Expertise, 85 NYU L. Rev. 174 (2010). There, I show that expert mining is one part of a broader problem of expert bias, and I propose a conditional-disclosure rule as the solution. This Essay provides some analysis of Gelbach’s framing of the problem, reviews the blinding proposal, and identifies the limits of Gelbach’s analyses.

Summary. For over two decades, the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions (CFNU) has been advocating for a national pharmacare plan. Now, as the costs of prescription drugs continue to rise, putting pressures on a health care system that is already stretched to the limit, the CFNU is gaining some new allies. There is a growing consensus that prescription drug policies require reform. Advocates for reform include the C.D. Howe Institute (a well-known public policy think tank), the Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association, provincial and territorial governments, as well as patient advocates from coast-to-coast. Like our premiers, the CFNU is committed to tackling the issue of escalating drug costs, while ensuring access and quality care. The failure to contain the costs of pharmaceuticals is threatening Canada’s ability to provide patients with the health care they need. A national pharmacare program is an urgent priority if our health care system is to provide patients with the medications they need.

Summary. This blog explores the role of structural incentives and institutional cultures in the systemic suppression of serious threats to public safety and public health.

Summary. Describes legal limits on illegal promotional speech by drug company representatives.

Summary. There has been an important development in the study of the right of access to public information and the so-called economics of information: by combining these two premises, it is possible to outline an economics theory of access to public information.

Summary. When governments ask companies for bribes, it leads to a prisoner's dilemma situation in public procurement processes. However, companies can manage to escape through collusion.

Summary. Logics of corruption compiles articles published by the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University and elsewhere. In these texts, Mosquera explores different logics to understand the individual and collective rationality of corruption. Moreover, the systematic study of the various logics of corruption is important if we are to find innovative solutions in the form of anti-corruption strategies.