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An Experimental Study of Jury Voting Behavior

In: The Political Economy of Governance

Author

Listed:
  • Lisa R. Anderson

    (College of William and Mary)

  • Charles A. Holt

    (University of Virginia)

  • Katri K. Sieberg

    (University of Tampere)

  • Allison L. Oldham

    (University of Virginia)

Abstract

This chapter uses experimental analysis to test the Feddersen and Pesendorfer (American Political Science Review 92(1):23–35, 1998) theoretical results regarding the Condorcet jury theorem. Under the assumption that jurors will vote strategically (rather than sincerely based on private information), Feddersen and Pesendorfer derive the surprising conclusion that a unanimity rule makes the conviction of innocent defendants more likely, as compared with majority rule voting. Previous experimental work largely supported these theoretical predictions regarding strategic individual behavior, but failed to find support for the conclusions about the relative merits of unanimity and majority rule procedures in terms of group decisions. We extend this literature with an experiment in which the cost of convicting an innocent defendant is specified to be more severe than the cost of acquitting a guilty defendant. This payoff asymmetry results in a higher threshold of reasonable doubt than the 0.5 level used in earlier studies. We find very little evidence of the strategic voting predicted by theory (even for our asymmetric payoff structure) and no difference between the use of unanimity and majority rules. Overall, it was very difficult for the juries in our experiment to achieve a conviction, and no incorrect convictions occurred. Our experimental results suggest that the standard risk neutrality assumption can lead to misleading conclusions. We argue that a high cost associated with convicting the innocent can interact with risk aversion to produce an even higher threshold of reasonable doubt than would result from risk neutrality, which tends to neutralize the negative effects of strategic voting under a unanimity rule.

Suggested Citation

  • Lisa R. Anderson & Charles A. Holt & Katri K. Sieberg & Allison L. Oldham, 2015. "An Experimental Study of Jury Voting Behavior," Studies in Political Economy, in: Norman Schofield & Gonzalo Caballero (ed.), The Political Economy of Governance, edition 127, pages 157-178, Springer.
  • Handle: RePEc:spr:stpocp:978-3-319-15551-7_8
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-15551-7_8
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    Citations

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    Cited by:

    1. Sourav Bhattacharya & John Duffy & Sun-Tak Kim, 2015. "Voting with Endogenous Information Acquisition: Theory and Evidence," Working Papers 151602, University of California-Irvine, Department of Economics.
    2. Simona Fabrizi & Steffen Lippert & Addison Pan & Matthew Ryan, 2021. "Unanimity under Ambiguity," Working Papers 2021-07, Auckland University of Technology, Department of Economics.
    3. Bernardo Moreno & María del Pino Ramos-Sosa & Ismael Rodriguez-Lara, 2019. "Conformity and truthful voting under different voting rules," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 53(2), pages 261-282, August.
    4. Lisa R. Anderson & Charles A. Holt & Katri K. Sieberg & Beth A. Freeborn, 2022. "An Experimental Study of Strategic Voting and Accuracy of Verdicts with Sequential and Simultaneous Voting," Games, MDPI, vol. 13(2), pages 1-28, March.
    5. Bhattacharya, Sourav & Duffy, John & Kim, SunTak, 2017. "Voting with endogenous information acquisition: Experimental evidence," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 102(C), pages 316-338.

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