Nonprofit Organizational Assessment

Judge's Confidence in Final Decision
There are several key aspects of the JAS system that influence the degree to which the
judge has confidence in his decision being accurate or correct. The amount of
agreement between advisors has been shown to affect judges' confidence in their
decision, such that higher disagreement between advisors is associated with low
confidence. Another factor that has demonstrated influence over judge confidence is the
amount of effort the judge must put forth to understand and react to the advice proffered
by the advisors. As effort to process and comprehend advice increases, so does a
judge's overall confidence in their final decision. Lastly, it was found that judges could
actually become overconfident in their decisions when having to rely almost completely
on advisor recommendations (due to not possessing nearly enough task-specific
information themselves).
Applications
Examples of judge–advisor systems can be found in many real-world situations. A
recent example of an important JAS situation was that of the controversy around the
federal loan guarantees to the now-bankrupt Solyndra. In this situation, as in many
other situations that reach the presidential office, there are many sources of diverse
advice that the president and other decision-makers receive. For example, both the
director of the National Economic Council and the Treasury secretary advised the
president that they believed the selection guidelines were not thorough enough and
might allow for funding of unnecessary, risky companies. However, the Energy
Secretary, under pressure from Congress, advised the president to actually speed up
loans and decrease scrutiny on the selection process. As demonstrated by several
studies, advisors with differing viewpoints and differing degrees of unique information
can interact with decision-makers in complex and sometimes detrimental ways. The
decision-makers are then in the difficult position of aggregating all this advice and
making the most informed policy decision. As with the Solyndra controversy, these
decisions can sometimes fall under great scrutiny and not produce the most effective
solution.
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