Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Institution
Articles 1 - 13 of 13
Full-Text Articles in Law
Nashbots: How Political Scientists Have Underestimated Human Rationality, And How To Fix It, Daniel Enemark, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner
Nashbots: How Political Scientists Have Underestimated Human Rationality, And How To Fix It, Daniel Enemark, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner
Faculty Scholarship
Political scientists use experiments to test the predictions of game-theoretic models. In a typical experiment, each subject makes choices that determine her own earnings and the earnings of other subjects, with payments corresponding to the utility payoffs of a theoretical game. But social preferences distort the correspondence between a subject’s cash earnings and her subjective utility, and since social preferences vary, anonymously matched subjects cannot know their opponents’ preferences between outcomes, turning many laboratory tasks into games of incomplete information. We reduce the distortion of social preferences by pitting subjects against algorithmic agents (“Nashbots”). Across 11 experimental tasks, subjects facing …
It Must Have Been Him: Coherence Effects Within The Legal System, Jonathan N. Carbone
It Must Have Been Him: Coherence Effects Within The Legal System, Jonathan N. Carbone
FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The present series of studies examine how jurors and public defenders evaluate different pieces of evidence and integrate them into a coherent conclusion within the context of a criminal case. Previous research has shown that in situations where both sides of the case are compelling, decision-makers nevertheless come to highly confident and polarized decisions, called coherence shifts (Simon, 2004). The present research sought to expand on coherence effects, improve upon the methodology of previous studies, and explore potential moderators of coherence. In Study 1, mock jurors (n = 306) read about a criminal case and evaluated multiple pieces of …
Against Game Theory, Gale M. Lucas, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner
Against Game Theory, Gale M. Lucas, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner
Faculty Scholarship
People make choices. Often, the outcome depends on choices other people make. What mental steps do people go through when making such choices? Game theory, the most influential model of choice in economics and the social sciences, offers an answer, one based on games of strategy such as chess and checkers: the chooser considers the choices that others will make and makes a choice that will lead to a better outcome for the chooser, given all those choices by other people. It is universally established in the social sciences that classical game theory (even when heavily modified) is bad at …
Are Individuals Fickle-Minded?, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner
Are Individuals Fickle-Minded?, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner
Faculty Scholarship
Game theory has been used to model large-scale social events — such as constitutional law, democratic stability, standard setting, gender roles, social movements, communication, markets, the selection of officials by means of elections, coalition formation, resource allocation, distribution of goods, and war — as the aggregate result of individual choices in interdependent decision-making. Game theory in this way assumes methodological individualism. The widespread observation that game theory predictions do not in general match observation has led to many attempts to repair game theory by creating behavioral game theory, which adds corrective terms to the game theoretic predictions in the hope …
Can Consumers Make Affordable Care Affordable? The Value Of Choice Architecture, Eric J. Johnson, Ran Hassin, Tom Baker, Allison T. Bajger, Galen Treuer
Can Consumers Make Affordable Care Affordable? The Value Of Choice Architecture, Eric J. Johnson, Ran Hassin, Tom Baker, Allison T. Bajger, Galen Treuer
All Faculty Scholarship
Starting this October, tens of millions will be choosing health coverage on a state or federal health insurance exchange as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. We examine how well people make these choices, how well they think they do, and what can be done to improve these choices. We conducted 6 experiments asking people to choose the most cost-effective policy using websites modeled on current exchanges. Our results suggest there is significant room for improvement. Without interventions, respondents perform at near chance levels and show a significant bias, overweighting out-of-pocket expenses and deductibles. Financial incentives do …
Metaphor And Analogy: The Sun And Moon Of Legal Persuasion, Linda L. Berger
Metaphor And Analogy: The Sun And Moon Of Legal Persuasion, Linda L. Berger
Scholarly Works
Drawing on recent studies of social cognition, decision making, and analogical processing, this article recommends that lawyers turn to novel characterizations and metaphors to solve a particular kind of persuasion problem that is created by the way judges and juries think and decide. According to social cognition researchers, we perceive and interpret new information by following a process of schematic cognition, analogizing the new data we encounter to the knowledge structures embedded in our memories. Decision-making researchers differentiate between intuitive and reflective processes (System 1 and System 2), and they agree that in System 1 decision making, only the most …
Cheap, Easy, Or Connected: The Conditions For Creating Group Coordination, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Daniel Rodriguez, Nicholas Weller
Cheap, Easy, Or Connected: The Conditions For Creating Group Coordination, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Daniel Rodriguez, Nicholas Weller
Faculty Scholarship
In both legal and political settings there has been a push toward adopting institutions that encourage consensus. The key feature of these institutions is that they bring interested parties together to communicate with each other. Existing research about the success or failure of particular institutions is ambiguous. Therefore, we turn our attention to understanding the general conditions when consensus is achievable, and we test experimentally three crucial factors that affect a group's ability to achieve consensus: (1) the difficulty of the problem, (2) the costs of communication, and (3) the structure of communication. Using multiple experimental approaches, we find that …
Can We Build Behavioral Game Theory?, Gale M. Lucas, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner
Can We Build Behavioral Game Theory?, Gale M. Lucas, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner
Faculty Scholarship
The way economists and other social scientists model how people make interdependent decisions is through the theory of games. Psychologists and behavioral economists, however, have established many deviations from the predictions of game theory. In response to these findings, a broad movement has arisen to salvage the core of game theory. Extant models of interdependent decision-making try to improve their explanatory domain by adding some corrective terms or limits. We will make the argument that this approach is misguided. For this approach to work, the deviations would have to be consistent. Drawing in part on our experimental results, we will …
The Theory Of Minds Within The Theory Of Games, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner, Nicholas Weller
The Theory Of Minds Within The Theory Of Games, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner, Nicholas Weller
Faculty Scholarship
Classical rationality as accepted by game theory assumes that a human chooser in a given moment has consistent preferences and beliefs and that actions result consistently from those preferences and beliefs, and moreover that these preferences, beliefs, and actions remain the same across equal choice moments. Since, as is widely found in prior experiments, subjects do not follow the predictions of classical rationality, behavioral game theorists have assumed consistent deviations from classical rationality by assigning to subjects certain dispositions— risk preference, cognitive abilities, social norms, etc. All of these theories are fundamentally cognitive theories, making claims about how individual human …
Knowing When To Trust Others: An Erp Study Of Decision-Making After Receiving Information From Unknown People, Cheryl Boudreau, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Seana Coulson
Knowing When To Trust Others: An Erp Study Of Decision-Making After Receiving Information From Unknown People, Cheryl Boudreau, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Seana Coulson
Faculty Scholarship
To address the neurocognitive mechanisms that underlie choices made after receiving information from an anonymous individual, reaction times (Experiment 1) and event-related brain potentials (Experiment 2) were recorded as participants played 3 variants of the Coin Toss game. In this game, participants guess the outcomes of unseen coin tosses after a person in another room (dubbed “the reporter”) observes the coin toss outcomes and then sends reports (which may or may not be truthful) to participants about whether the coins landed on heads or tails. Participants knew that the reporter's interests either were aligned with their own (Common Interests), opposed …
Nothing But The Truth? Experiments On Adversarial Competition, Expert Testimony, And Decision Making, Cheryl Boudreau, Mathew D. Mccubbins
Nothing But The Truth? Experiments On Adversarial Competition, Expert Testimony, And Decision Making, Cheryl Boudreau, Mathew D. Mccubbins
Faculty Scholarship
Many scholars debate whether a competition between experts in legal, political, or economic contexts elicits truthful information and, in turn, enables people to make informed decisions. Thus, we analyze experimentally the conditions under which competition between experts induces the experts to make truthful statements and enables jurors listening to these statements to improve their decisions. Our results demonstrate that, contrary to game theoretic predictions and contrary to critics of our adversarial legal system, competition induces enough truth telling to allow jurors to improve their decisions. Then, when we impose additional institutions (such as penalties for lying or the threat of …
The Methodology Of The Behavioral Analysis Of Law, Avishalom Tor
The Methodology Of The Behavioral Analysis Of Law, Avishalom Tor
Journal Articles
This article examines the behavioral analysis of law, meaning the application of empirical behavioral evidence to legal analysis, which has become increasingly popular in legal scholarship in recent years. Following the introduction in Part I, this Article highlights four central propositions on the subject. The first, developed in Part II, asserts that the efficacy of the law often depends on its accounting for relevant patterns of human behavior, most notably those studied by behavioral decision scientists. This Part therefore reviews important behavioral findings, illustrating their application and relevance to a broad range of legal questions. Part III then argues that …
Judging By Heuristic: Cognitive Illusions In Judicial Decision Making, Chris Guthrie, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski, Andrew J. Wistrich
Judging By Heuristic: Cognitive Illusions In Judicial Decision Making, Chris Guthrie, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski, Andrew J. Wistrich
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
The institutional legitmacy of the judiciary depends on the quality of the judgments that judges make. Even the most talented and dedicated judges surely make occasional mistakes, but the public expects judges to avoid making systematic errors that favor particular parties or writing opinions that embed these mistakes into the substantive law. Psychological research on human judgment, however, suggests that this expectation might be unrealistic.