Transparency Paradox? How Live-Streamed Court Trials Lead to Unintended Local Protectionism via Restructured Information Environment
COM2 Level 4
Executive Classroom, COM2-04-02
Abstract:
ICT-enabled transparency reshapes the information environment of decision making and may induce strategic responses from affected actors. Using China’s live-streamed court trials (LSCTs) as a canonical setting, we examine how judicial visibility affects judicial local protectionism (JLP) and enables firms to leverage pre-adjudication media narratives to influence legal outcomes. We compile and analyze 186,111 first-instance civil judgments involving A-share listed firms or their subsidiaries (2015–June 2025) and link them to case-level broadcast records. We find that LSCT amplifies rather than mitigates JLP: locally registered firms are more likely to win when cases are livestreamed. We further identify a visibility–narrative mechanism, whereby local firms strategically shape pre-adjudication media narratives in advance of livestreamed trials, thereby improving subsequent legal outcomes. Our findings reveal an unintended consequence of digital transparency in the legal sector: increased visibility can be strategically exploited and may reinforce, rather than reduce, preexisting local advantages. We further propose Case Vulnerability Detector (CVD), a machine-learning framework that identifies disputes whose predicted outcomes are sensitive to media signals, enabling targeted safeguards for media-vulnerable cases.
Bio:
Dr. Zhengrui (Jeffrey) Jiang is an SFI Chair Professor and Professor of Information Systems in the School of Management and Economics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. Before joining CUHK-Shenzhen, he was the Thome Professor in Business and Professor of Information Systems and Business Analytics in the Ivy College of Business, Iowa State University and a Distinguished Professor in Nanjing University Business School. Dr. Jiang's primary research interests include business intelligence and analytics, optimization/decision-making under uncertainty, diffusion of technological innovations, and economics of information technology. His research has appeared in premier academic journals including Management Science, MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. Dr. Jiang currently serves as a senior editor for Information Systems Research. He previously served as an associate editor for both MIS Quarterly and Information Systems Research and received Outstanding Associate Editor Awards from the two journals in 2016 and 2021, respectively. In addition, he is currently a senior editor for Production and Operations Management and Decision Support Systems.