Bounded Rationality and the Choice of Jury Selection Procedures

Abstract

A peremptory-challenge procedure allows the parties to a jury trial to dismiss some prospective jurors without justification. Complex challenge procedures offer an unfair advantage to parties who are better able to strategize. I introduce a new measure of strategic complexity based on level-k thinking and use this measure to compare challenge procedures often used in practice. In applying this measure, I overturn some commonly held beliefs about which jury selection procedures are strategically simple. I am grateful to the editor and a referee for useful remarks and suggestions. I am also grateful to

Strategically Simple Mechanisms

“…In complete information models, De Clippel, Eliaz, and Knight () and Van der Linden () used the number of rounds of elimination of dominated strategies, or of backward induction, that are required to solve a mechanism as a measure of the strategic complexity of mechanisms for the choice of an arbitrator or of a jury. This idea is closely related to our notion of strategic simplicity.…”