Strategic auditing in a political hierarchy: An informational model of theSupreme Court's certiorari decisions

We examine how the Supreme Court uses signals and indices from lower courts to determine which cases to review. In our game theoretic model, a higher court cues from publicly observable case facts, the known preferences of a lower court and its derision. The lower court attempts to enforce its own p references, exploiting ambiguity in cases' fact patterns. In equilibrium, a conservative higher court declines to review conservative decisions from l ower courts regardless of the facts of die case or the relative ideology of the judges. But a conservative higher court probabilistically reviews libe ral decisions, with the "audit rate" tied to observable facts and the ideol ogy of the lower court judge. We derive comparative static results and rest them with a random sample of search-and-seizure cases appealed to the Burg er Court between 1972 and 1986. The evidence broadly supports the model.