When Should Political Scientists Use the Self-Confirming Equilibrium Concept? Benefits, Costs, and an Application to Jury Theorems

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When Should Political Scientists Use the Self-Confirming Equilibrium Concept? Benefits, Costs, and an Application to Jury Theorems

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Lupia, Arthur
Levine, Adam Seth
Zharinova, Natasha

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Arthur Lupia

Abstract

Many claims about political behavior are based on implicit assumptions about how people think. One such assumption, that political actors use identical conjectures when assessing others’ strategies, is nested within applications of widely-used game theoretic equilibrium concepts. When empirical research calls this assumption into question, the self-confirming equilibrium (SCE) concept is an alternate criterion for deriving theoretical claims. Using a series of examples, we examine opportunities and challenges inherent in applying the SCE concept. Our main example focuses on Feddersen and Pesendorfer’s (1998) claim that unanimity rules can lead juries to convict innocent defendants. Using SCE, we show that the claim depends on the assumption that jurors have identical beliefs about one another’s strategies. When juror beliefs vary in ways that follow from empirical jury research, we show that fewer false convictions can occur in equilibrium. Generally, the SCE confers advantages when actors have different conjectures about one another’s strategies.

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Paper provided by University Library of Munich, Germany in its series MPRA Paper with number 8643.

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Date of creation: 07 May 2008
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Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:8643

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
K0 - Law and Economics - - General
D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search, Learning, and Information
D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Models of Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

NEP-ALL-2008-05-10 (All new papers)
NEP-CDM-2008-05-10 (Collective Decision-Making)
NEP-HPE-2008-05-10 (History & Philosophy of Economics)
NEP-POL-2008-05-10 (Positive Political Economics)

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Dekel, Eddie & Fudenberg, Drew & Levine, David K., 2004. "Learning to play Bayesian games," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 46(2), pages 282-303, February. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
Other versions:
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Other versions:
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Timothy Feddersen & Wolfgang Pesendorfer, 1996. "Convicting the Innocent: The Inferiority of Unanimous Jury Verdicts," Discussion Papers 1170, Northwestern University, Center for Mathematical Studies in Economics and Management Science. [Downloadable!]
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Other versions:
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