Secret ballots and costly information gathering: the jury size problem revisited

Suppose paying attention during jury trials is costly, but that jurors do not pool information (as in contemporary Brazil, or ancient Athens). If inattentive jurors are as likely to be wrong as right, I find that small jury panels work better as long as identical jurors behave symmetrically. If not paying attention makes error more likely than not, jurors may co-ordinate on two different symmetric outcomes: a “high-attention” one or a “low attention” one. If social norms stigmatize shirking, jurors co-ordinate on the high-attention equilibrium, and a smaller jury yields better outcomes. However, increasing the jury up to a finite bound works better if norms are tolerant of shirking, in which case co-ordination on the low-attention outcome results. If the cost of attention is high, a bare majority of jurors pay attention, and efficiency increases in jury size up to a bound. The model also applies to elections and referendums

Should Jurors Deliberate?

Does the accuracy of verdicts improve or worsen if individual jurors on a panel are barred from deliberating prior to casting their votes? I study this question in a model where jurors can choose to exert costly effort to improve the accuracy of their individual decisions. I find that, provided the cost of effort is not too large, there is a threshold jury size above which it is better to allow jurors to deliberate. For panels smaller than this threshold, it is more effective to instruct jurors to vote on the basis of their private information, without deliberations, and to use a simple majority rule to determine the collective decision (regardless of the voting rule used with deliberations). The smaller the cost of paying attention, the larger the threshold above which the switch to allowing deliberations becomes optimal. However, if the unanimity rule had to be maintained under the no-deliberations system, it would be better to allow deliberation. The results apply to binary decision making in any committee where the committee members incur some effort in reviewing the evidence. Examples are tenure and promotion committees and some board of director meetings on issues such as whether to dismiss a CEO

Costly information acquisition. Is it better to toss a coin?

This paper presents a strategic model of common value elections with endogenous information acquisition. It proves that majoritarian elections can fail to aggregate information when voters have heterogeneous skills and provides necessary and sufficient conditions for information aggregation. Inefficiencies can be partially corrected by limiting participation to the most competent citizens, a result which provides a rational foundation for epistocratic government

Impact of information acquisition costs on voting choices : an experimental study on information acquisition and ideological distances

Individual decision-making and its applications have been of scientific interest for a long time. Decision-making is central to behaviour and can have multiple stages and contexts. This thesis looks at voting behaviour with a focus on the very initial stages of choice-making. The aim is to investigate how influential information acquisition and the related costs are to a personally rational decision – one in which the individual chooses a representative for themselves that best complements their ideological views. This thesis takes the unique viewpoint of a multiparty setting and adapts mathematical models to quantify the different variables associated with voting choices. To build a fuller representation of how these information acquisition costs influence choices, a pilot laboratory experiment is conducted. The results obtained suggest that information acquisition is highly influential to the outcomes of voting and needs to be well balanced, as information enhances the gains from voting, but the costs from acquiring information can have a negative impact on the outcome. Additionally, it is found that the initial information an individual possesses guides their further desire to look for information. This study concludes that there seems to be a need to study the issue further to better understand how decisions are made in a multiparty system and how information affects these decisions