Information Processing and Jury Decisionmaking

Abstract We develop a model to explore the information processing function that jury deliberation and its analogues perform. The central question we ask is: How much better could a jury possibly perform if it optimally used the collective information available to it than if it decides cases by a simple majority vote before any deliberation or information sharing occurs? It is shown how the answer depends on a number of considerations, including the correlation among jurors' observations, the jurors' assessments of the relative importance of type I and type II errors compared with society's assessment of those errors, and differences in jurors' abilities.