Governments looking to allocate scarce resources must be informed both on available policy altern... more Governments looking to allocate scarce resources must be informed both on available policy alternatives, and on the likely impacts these policies will have on social welfare. Does one build a school? A hospital? Or maybe a police station? How big a societal issue is crime, relative to maintaining levels of human capital, or healthcare standards? Might these priorities differ if those in charge knew that another election was around the corner? Not only does Arrow’s impossibility theorem mean that policymakers are unable to aggregate social preferences in a democratic and consistent way, but there is also no current consensus on whether additional police resources achieve their goal of crime reduction, presenting further academic and practical challenges. Using a novel identification strategy, this paper demonstrates that for certain types of crime, police exert a deterrence effect. However, further policy-relevant questions such as whether the crime reductions justify the financial and opportunity costs of additional police, and whether other social programs may be more efficient in reducing crime, are beyond the scope of this paper.
Condorcet’s jury theorem provides a theoretical foundation for why we should put our faith in the... more Condorcet’s jury theorem provides a theoretical foundation for why we should put our faith in the decisions of collectives. However, it assumes that individuals vote truthfully regardless of whether they are voting in isolation or in a group setting. We present a two-stage Bayesian game in which members of the jury share a common goal of delivering justice, but may disagree over the defendant’s guilt. The jurors are rational expected utility maximisers who draw two independent signals, conveying their verdict preference and verdict certainty, and must then optimally select whether to vote truthfully or falsify their preferences in the initial vote taken by the jury. The consequences of non-unanimity in the initial vote are the jury deliberations, where jurors compete in a tournament to convince members of the opposing preference faction to vote acquiesce. We derive that the probability that all jurors vote truthfully is greater under a secret ballot in ambiguous trials that produce similarly sized preference factions, and is greater under a public vote in unambiguous cases with a clear majority faction in favour of either conviction or acquittal. We then conduct causal 2SLS estimation and empirically verify that the secret ballot increases truthful voting in ambiguous trials by 8.4%, but detect no significant effect in unambiguous trials. We overcome endogeneity concerns by instrumenting the jury’s choice over the secrecy of the initial vote with previous juror experience and whether the judge gifted the jury with notebooks for the trial, and our 2SLS estimates are robust to estimation by a two-step GMM procedure. We conclude by recommending that judges mandate the use of a secret ballot, in order to mitigate the extensive and persist societal costs associated with lying on juries.
Governments looking to allocate scarce resources must be informed both on available policy altern... more Governments looking to allocate scarce resources must be informed both on available policy alternatives, and on the likely impacts these policies will have on social welfare. Does one build a school? A hospital? Or maybe a police station? How big a societal issue is crime, relative to maintaining levels of human capital, or healthcare standards? Might these priorities differ if those in charge knew that another election was around the corner? Not only does Arrow’s impossibility theorem mean that policymakers are unable to aggregate social preferences in a democratic and consistent way, but there is also no current consensus on whether additional police resources achieve their goal of crime reduction, presenting further academic and practical challenges. Using a novel identification strategy, this paper demonstrates that for certain types of crime, police exert a deterrence effect. However, further policy-relevant questions such as whether the crime reductions justify the financial and opportunity costs of additional police, and whether other social programs may be more efficient in reducing crime, are beyond the scope of this paper.
Condorcet’s jury theorem provides a theoretical foundation for why we should put our faith in the... more Condorcet’s jury theorem provides a theoretical foundation for why we should put our faith in the decisions of collectives. However, it assumes that individuals vote truthfully regardless of whether they are voting in isolation or in a group setting. We present a two-stage Bayesian game in which members of the jury share a common goal of delivering justice, but may disagree over the defendant’s guilt. The jurors are rational expected utility maximisers who draw two independent signals, conveying their verdict preference and verdict certainty, and must then optimally select whether to vote truthfully or falsify their preferences in the initial vote taken by the jury. The consequences of non-unanimity in the initial vote are the jury deliberations, where jurors compete in a tournament to convince members of the opposing preference faction to vote acquiesce. We derive that the probability that all jurors vote truthfully is greater under a secret ballot in ambiguous trials that produce similarly sized preference factions, and is greater under a public vote in unambiguous cases with a clear majority faction in favour of either conviction or acquittal. We then conduct causal 2SLS estimation and empirically verify that the secret ballot increases truthful voting in ambiguous trials by 8.4%, but detect no significant effect in unambiguous trials. We overcome endogeneity concerns by instrumenting the jury’s choice over the secrecy of the initial vote with previous juror experience and whether the judge gifted the jury with notebooks for the trial, and our 2SLS estimates are robust to estimation by a two-step GMM procedure. We conclude by recommending that judges mandate the use of a secret ballot, in order to mitigate the extensive and persist societal costs associated with lying on juries.
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