The market for lawyers and quality layers in legal services
研究了律师市场中诉讼当事人、律师和法官的战略互动，分析了法律代表价值和女王律师等质量认证体系的影响，发现声誉导致法官偏向认证律师，造成市场失衡，质量提升虽增福利但公开质量信息可能降低福利。
We study the functioning of the market for lawyers, considering the strategic interaction among litigants, lawyers, and judges. We investigate the value of legal representation and of systems of quality certification, such as the Queen’s Counsel system. In our setting, higher quality lawyers obtain better‐quality evidence and are better able to interpret it. Judges receive information from the lawyers and have reputational concerns. We show that reputational concerns generate a decision bias in favor of certified lawyers and that this causes misallocation of lawyers at the market equilibrium. As a result, whereas a higher quality of lawyers increases welfare, public information over quality may be welfare reducing.