Does Jury Bias Matter?
Posted: 14 May 1999
Date Written: March 1999
Abstract
Froeb and Kobayashi (1996) find that endogenous expenditure decisions at trial tend to eliminate an exogenously given jury bias. For interior solutions, they find the initial bias to be totally eliminated. We find, however, that once the participation constraint of the plaintiff and defendant are taken into account, strong priors by the jury tend to deteriorate the quality of the cases which are filed by the plaintiff and defended by the defendant. We also explore an alternative form for jury bias, and find that it is generally non neutral with respect to the trial outcome. We find further that the use of the English rule may compound the effects of a strong jury bias.
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