We analyze a setting where the court has to impose liability with imperfect evidence on the defendant’s actions, and where the court is concerned about both deterrence and judicial errors. We provide a formal definition of the quality of evidence that allows us to compare evidence from very different sources and of a very different nature in terms of informativeness. When imposing liability, the court’s optimal policy is to set an evidentiary standard. The main result of the article is that with a higher quality of evidence, more lenient evidentiary standards generate greater welfare. We also find that when the agent can influence the informativeness of the evidence the interests of court and agent are not aligned. The optimal court policy may involve penalizing (even forbidding) actions leading to less informative evidence.

中文翻译：

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证据质量和法律决策

我们分析了法院必须在证据不完整的情况下对被告的行为施加责任，以及法院同时关注威慑和司法错误的情况。我们提供了证据质量的正式定义，使我们能够比较来自非常不同来源和在信息量方面非常不同性质的证据。在追究责任时，法院的最佳政策是设定证据标准。文章的主要结果是，证据质量越高，证据标准越宽松，就会产生更大的福利。我们还发现，当代理人可以影响证据的信息量时，法院和代理人的利益并不一致。最佳的法院政策可能涉及惩罚（甚至禁止）导致信息量较少的证据的行为。