Efeitos da ancoragem nas decisões judiciais : o caso das indenizações concedidas judicialmente por danos extrapatrimoniais decorrentes de morte

Abstract

The judicial quantification of indemnities for exclusively moral damages is given through arbitration and configures situation in which an individual is called to predict values in an environment of uncertainty. The estimation of values can be affected by the anchoring effect, which can occur either because of a representative anchor (insufficient adjustment) or because of a non-representative anchor (priming). As a result, this dissertation sought to verify if the judicial decision-making process that results in the quantification of exclusively moral damages is subject to the effects of the anchorage, considering anchors representative or not. In order to do so, we used indemnification actions for extra-patrimonial damages resulting from death, which were processed in the Common State Court of Rio Grande do Sul, from 2014 to 2018. The analysis was performed using dispersion plots, Pearson correlation coefficients and explanatory regressions. The results indicated that magistrates are subject to the anchoring effects induced by the values of the indemnification requests inserted by the authors in their initial petitions (representative anchor), being less likely to incur such an effect when called to decide concrete cases than when addressed in the thesis. The anchoring, however, seems mitigated by the obedience of the magistrates of the origin to the precedents of the reviewing court. On the other hand, the judges do not seem to be subject to anchoring effects generated by the value of the cause (an anchor that is not representative), contained in the initial petitions in which the authors abstained from suggesting to the judge a quantum of indemnity. The current system seems to produce incentives for the parties to file claims with overestimated compensation amounts, in order to anchor the judge's arbitration and obtain higher compensation.