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Tantri's research, Part 2: can transparency reduce judicial bias?
Tantri sent the introduction to his other working paper into the WhatsApp group — on whether forcing courts to be transparent reduces the well-documented bias of judges toward (or against) regulators. Verbatim.
- #research
- #judicial-bias
- #transparency
- #law-and-economics
- #india
- #tantri-research
- #tantri-files
From The Tantri Files — verbatim writing from Prof. Tantri’s WhatsApp messages, with his blessing. On June 26, 2025, between exam discussions, Tantri dropped the introduction to a second working paper into the group.
The setup, in his words
Instead of asking these things, students ask what kind of questions I will give in the final exam. That is a bit sad.
That was the line that preceded what came next — a paragraph he’d been working on for a paper on judicial bias and transparency.
The introduction
The existence of judicial bias of various types is a well-established fact (cite XXX). An important type of bias is judges’ tendency to be pro-regulation or pro-business. The extant research has established the existence of this bias and explored its micro and macroeconomic consequences. Some studies have pointed out both ex-ante and ex-post distortions induced by the above bias in several markets including product, labor and credit markets (cite XXXX).
Therefore, thinking about ways of reducing this bias becomes important.
In this paper, we ask whether transparency can reduce judicial bias.
He didn’t send the rest of the abstract into the group — the (cite XXX) placeholders show this is genuinely a first draft he’s still working on. But the framing alone is enough to sit with.
What’s at stake
Three reasons this matters, as Tantri has emphasised in class on different occasions:
One — judicial bias is not abstract. Whether a tribunal of judges leans pro-regulation or pro-business changes how loans get recovered, how labor disputes resolve, how SARFAESI cases play out, how IBC admissions move. The macro effect of micro judicial leanings adds up.
Two — the existing literature has documented it but not solved it. The “well-established fact” Tantri opens with is exactly that — established. The frontier is not measurement; it is intervention.
Three — transparency is the cheapest possible intervention. No structural reform, no judicial appointments overhaul, no legislative change. Just: make the rulings, the reasoning, and the patterns observable. Whether that’s enough is what this paper is asking.
The question of whether transparency actually changes behavior is genuinely open. We have plenty of cases where being watched changes what people do, and plenty where it doesn’t. (In economics this lives under the umbrella of “audit experiments” and “monitoring with selection.”) If the paper finds an effect, the policy lever is essentially free. If it doesn’t, the existing literature has its answer too.
Editor’s notes
The opening paragraph of the paper is reproduced verbatim from a single WhatsApp message Tantri sent on June 26, 2025. The “What’s at stake” section is editorial commentary, not Tantri’s writing. The paper itself is unpublished; we’ll link it when a working version goes up on SSRN.
This is a companion to Part 1 of Tantri’s research series on using savings-account transactions to predict loan performance.