g comments on Unbounded Scales, Huge Jury Awards, & Futurism - Less Wrong
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Comments (8)
The damages experiment, as described here, seems not to nail things down enough to say that what's going on is that damages are expressions of outrage on a scale with arbitrary modulus. Here's one alternative explanation that seems consistent with everything you've said: subjects vary considerably in their assessment of how effective a given level of damages is in deterring malfeasance, and that assessment influences (in the obvious way) their assessment of damages.
(I should add that I find the arbitrary-modulus explanation more plausible.)