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This paper investigates court congestion through a field study conducted at the Jerusalem District Court in Israel, aiming to reduce case processing time by adapting successful operational concepts to this unique environment. Using a modified difference-in-differences approach, the study suggests a notable 46.1% reduction in the duration of the treated part of the judicial process, demonstrating the efficacy of operational management tools in alleviating court congestion without compromising process quality or requiring additional resources. Court congestion is a worldwide phenomenon with negative societal effects such as delayed access to justice and drawn-out procedures, as well as negative economic ramifications. In this paper, we report on a field study conducted in cooperation with the Jerusalem District Court in Israel with the aim of reducing average case processing time within the existing set of resources. To achieve this goal, we analyzed the judicial process using operational concepts that have been successfully implemented in other contexts, and we adapted them to the court process. We further collected data before and after the operational changes were implemented to assess the efficacy of the implementation. We exploited the distinctive structure of the judicial process and the fact that our operational changes targeted one part of that process to propose a variation of the difference-in-differences approach to measure the process improvement. The results suggest that the duration of the treated part of the process was reduced by 46.1% postimplementation. We further examined the effect of the treatment on the quality of the process, measured by appeal rate, and found no adverse effect. These analyses demonstrate the potential of using operational management tools and concepts to improve judicial processes and to contribute to the alleviation of court congestion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Partial vertical ownership describes a situation in which a firm holds financial shares in either its supplier (referred to as partial backward integration) or its customer (partial forward integration). We study the effect of such financial interconnectedness on two operational decisions: capacity investment and information exchange. In our model, a retailer, who has superior information about the future market demand, has passive financial holdings in the supplier. Although this passive financial investment does not enable the retailer to directly influence the supplier's operational decisions, it does affect the market equilibrium. Specifically, financial interconnectedness between the firms can result in the retailer financing the entire capacity in the market. In addition, we characterize the conditions that ensure that information between the retailer and the supplier can be exchanged via cheap-talk communication. Interestingly, a high level of information asymmetry facilitates the exchange of information via cheap talk in the presence of these financial links. When cheap talk is not possible, we study the separating equilibrium that is achieved through the retailer's commitment to order in advance. In this case, the separating quantity can either increase or decrease with the level partial vertical ownership, and this trend does not depend the actual level of the financial holdings. We further analyze the incentive of the retailer to conceal demand information by choosing a pooling equilibrium and conclude with discussing the effect of the financial interconnectedness on the parties' operational payoffs. This paper was accepted by Jayashankar Swaminathan, operations management. Funding: N. Shamir gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Israel Science Foundation [Grant 2358/22] and The Henry Crown Institute of Business Research in Israel. T. Avinadav gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Israel Science Foundation [Grant 1571/20]. Supplemental Material: Data and the electronic companion are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4673. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If there is some truth to the adage that justice must not only be done, but must be seen to be done, then surely it must be seen to be done in a timely manner. Yet court congestion and delays – which threaten to undermine the justice system – have become global phenomena with significant adverse implications for social welfare, economic development, and civil rights. This work describes an application of the Theory of Constraints (TOC) to the judicial system for the purpose of designing an intervention to alleviate court congestion – an intervention that won the 2012 Goldratt Foundation New Knowledge Award. In cooperation with the Jerusalem District Court in Israel, the judicial process was reviewed through the lens of TOC, and a set of operational changes was implemented to reduce case processing time. Data collected before and after this intervention indicate the potential of achieving lead‐time reduction by applying TOC to judicial environments. Highlights: Judicial systems suffer from operational inefficiencies that result in significant delays.We offer a systematic approach to analyze such systems through the prism of the Theory of Constraints.Several suggestions for improvements are discussed and initial data are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collusion describes a situation in which firms coordinate their strategies to increase their profit compared with the competitive outcome. In this work, we explore the incentives and ability of service providers, serving delay‐sensitive customers to form a cartel. To do so, we develop an infinitely repeated game in which two service providers, each modeled as an M/M/1 queue, interact in the market repeatedly. We demonstrate that the incentives to collude depend on the competitive landscape in the market. When the competition in the market is high the incentives to form a cartel are strong since the cartel allows the service providers to extract all the surplus from the customers. However, operating under these market conditions does not imply that the ability to collude exists as well. We discuss the effect of market parameters such as delay sensitivity, service value and capacity level on the ability of the service providers to collude. We show that a high service value, high delay sensitivity and asymmetric capacity levels can actually hurt the service providers as they may impede their ability to form the cartel. We further discuss the welfare implications of collusive behavior, and the way it affects the incentives to invest in capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the absence of antitrust regulations, rational profit-maximizing firms in an oligopoly may freely act in consort to reach a consensus and to maintain prices above the competitive level. However, in light of potential exposure to antitrust investigations and prospective heavy sanctions, firms attempt to achieve collusive outcomes without resorting to explicit agreements. One mechanism that may promote such tacit collusion is information-sharing; that is, the otherwise competing firms exchange their private information in order to set and maintain supra-competitive prices. Thus far, the attention of the antitrust authorities and scholars has focused on the phenomenon of horizontal information-sharing, i.e., the exchange of information between rival firms that operate at the same economic level. Contrary to this body of work, this article focuses on the effect of vertical information-sharing on the ability of the firms to collude. Recently, it has been shown that when competing retailers disclose their private information to a mutual manufacturer, the wholesale price set by the latter provides a signal to the retailers. This signal allows the retailers to fix prices without the necessity of any direct communication between them, thereby achieving a collusive outcome while avoiding the risk of being exposed to the scrutiny of the antitrust authorities. Another fascinating aspect of the collusion achieved through vertical information-exchange is that it can generate social costs higher than those of direct collusion. In other words, from the social welfare perspective, in certain instances--such as those discussed in this article--the social planner would be better off allowing competing firms to collude directly, rather than exchanging their private information via their mutual manufacturer. Therefore, understanding the neglected impact of vertical information-sharing is important not only for effective antitrust laws, but also for developing effective policies and regulations. Calling into focus the strategic behavior of competing retailers that may produce outcomes similar--or even severer--than those resulting from collusive agreement based on horizontal information-sharing, this article is the first attempt to address the legal implications of such a scheme, while integrating the findings of the economic literature. In particular, this article argues that: (1) antitrust authorities should broaden the scope of their scrutiny to include vertical information-sharing; and (2) case law permits such information-sharing to be condemned under the Sherman Act if it produces anticompetitive effects without counterbalancing procompetitive effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While much legal research has examined the problem of court delays and backlogs, the link between the prosecutor's incentives to press charges and the subsequent effect on congestion in the criminal justice system has remained largely overlooked. To understand the implications of such decisions for court congestion, we model prosecutor incentives using queuing theory. We demonstrate that a benevolent decision-maker weighs the trade-off between the desire to increase the volume of cases reaching the court in order to convict the guilty and the delay costs that are due to the length of court proceedings. Using two prosecutorial incentive schemes that have previously been identified in the literature-the conviction rate and the total number of convictions-we find that a prosecutor who is acting to increase his own utility would deviate from charging the socially-desired number of cases. Following these negative results, we design a mechanism that induces the prosecutor to press charges in the socially-optimal number of cases. Also new in this paper is the methodology of using queuing theory in conjunction with issues of court delay and prosecution incentives. While thus far this tool has been widely applied in other disciplines of economics research, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to utilize this method in issues related to court congestion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]