Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T20:23:53.712Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

When Should Political Scientists Use the Self-Confirming Equilibrium Concept? Benefits, Costs, and an Application to Jury Theorems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Arthur Lupia ,
Adam Seth Levine  and
Natasha Zharinova
Arthur Lupia*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, 4252 Institute for Social Research, 426 Thompson Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2321
Adam Seth Levine
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, 4252 Institute for Social Research, 426 Thompson Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2321. e-mail: [email protected]
Natasha Zharinova
Affiliation:
Risk Advisory Services, ABN AMRO Bank N.V., Gustav Mahlerlaan 10, PO Box 283, 1000 EA Amsterdam, The Netherlands. e-mail: [email protected]
*
e-mail: [email protected] (corresponding author)
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Many claims about political behavior are based on implicit assumptions about how people think. One such assumption, that political actors use identical conjectures when assessing others' strategies, is nested within applications of widely used game-theoretic equilibrium concepts. When empirical findings call this assumption into question, the self-confirming equilibrium (SCE) concept provides an alternate criterion for theoretical claims. We examine applications of SCE to political science. Our main example focuses on the claim of Feddersen and Pesendorfer that unanimity rule can lead juries to convict innocent defendants (1998. Convicting the innocent: The inferiority of unanimous jury verdicts under strategic voting. American Political Science Review 92:23–35). We show that the claim depends on the assumption that jurors have identical beliefs about one another's types and identical conjectures about one another's strategies. When jurors' beliefs and conjectures vary in ways documented by empirical jury research, fewer false convictions can occur in equilibrium. The SCE concept can confer inferential advantages when actors have different beliefs and conjectures about one another.

Type
Research Article
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , Winter 2010 , pp. 103 - 123
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Author's note: We thank Timothy J. Feddersen, Drew Fudenberg, Alexander Von Hagen-Jamar, Mika Lavaque-Manty, Justin Magouirk, William McMillan, Marco Novarese, Scott E. Page, Thomas Palfrey, Alexandra Shankster, Dustin Tingley, and Barry R. Weingast for helpful comments.

References

Aumann, Robert. 1974. Subjectivity and correlation in randomized strategies. Journal of Mathematical Economics 1: 67–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aumann, Robert, and Brandenberger, Adam. 1995. Epistemic conditions for Nash equilibrium. Econometrica 63: 1161–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Austen-Smith, David, and Banks, Jeffrey S. 1996. Information aggregation, rationality, and the Condorcet jury theorem. American Political Science Review 90: 34–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Austen-Smith, David, and Feddersen, Timothy J. 2006. Deliberation, preference uncertainty, and voting rules. American Political Science Review 100: 209–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bernheim, B. Douglas. 1984. Rationalizable strategic behavior. Econometrica 52: 1007–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bjork, Elizabeth Ligon, and Bjork, Robert. 1996. Continuing influences of to-be-forgotten information. Consciousness and Cognition 5: 176–96.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Byrne, Ruth M.J., Segura, Susana, Culhane, Ronan, Tasso, Alessandra, and Berrocal, Pablo. 2000. The temporaility effect in counterfactual thinking about what might have been. Memory and Cognition 28: 264–81.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cacioppo, John T., and Petty, Richard E. 1982. The need for cognition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 42: 116–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, Arthur R., Stotland, Ezra, and Wolfe, Donald M. 1955. An experimental investigation of need for cognition. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 51: 291–94.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
de Condorcet, Marquis [1785] 1994. Essai sur application de l'analyse a la probability des decisions rendues a la plurality des voix. Paris: Translation by lain McLean and Fiona Hewitt.Google Scholar
Coughlan, Peter J. 2000. In defense of unanimous jury verdicts: Mistrials, communication, and strategic voting. American Political Science Review 94: 375–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de Figueiredo, Rui, Rakove, Jack, and Weingast, Barry R. 2006. Rationality, inaccurate mental models and self-confirming equilibrium: A new understanding of the American Revolution. Journal of Theoretical Politics 18: 384–415.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dekel, Eddie, Fudenberg, Drew, and Levine, David K. 1999. Payoff information and self-confirming equilibrium. Journal of Economic Theory 89: 165–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dekel, Eddie, Fudenberg, Drew, and Levine, David K. 2004. Learning to play Bayesian games. Games and Economic Behavior 46: 282–303.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Devine, Dennis J., Clayton, Laura D., Dunford, Benjamin B., Seying, Rasmy, and Pryce, Jennifer. 2001. Jury decision making: 45 years of empirical research on deliberating groups. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 7: 622–727.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feddersen, Timothy, and Pesendorfer, Wolfgang. 1998. Convicting the innocent: The inferiority of unanimous jury verdicts under strategic voting. American Political Science Review 92: 23–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fudenberg, Drew, and Kreps, David M. 1995. Learning in extensive-form games I: Self-confirming equilibrium. Games and Economic Behavior 8: 20–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fudenberg, Drew, and Levine, David K. 1993. Self-confirming equilibrium. Econometrica 61: 523–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fudenberg, Drew, and Levine, David K. 1998. The theory of learning in games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Gibbons, Robert. 1992. Game Theory for Applied Economists. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Govindan, Srihari, and Wilson, Robert B. 2008. Refinements of Nash equilibrium. In The new Palgrave dictionary of economics. 2nd ed., eds. Durlauf, Steven N. and Blume, Lawrence E. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Available at http://www.dictionaryofeconomics.com/article?id=pde2008_R000242 doi:10.1057/9780230226203.1155Google Scholar
Guernaschelli, Serena, McKelvey, Richard D., and Palfrey, Thomas R. 2000. An experimental study of jury decision rules. American Political Science Review 94: 407–23.Google Scholar
Hafer, Catherine, and Landa, Dimitri. 2007. Deliberation as self-discovery and institutions for political speech. Journal of Theoretical Politics 19: 329–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harsanyi, John. 1967. Games with incomplete information played by ‘Bayesian’ players I: The basic model. Management Science 14: 159–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harsanyi, John. 1968. Games with incomplete information played by ‘Bayesian’ players II: Bayesian equilibrium points. Management Science 14: 320–34.Google Scholar
Hastie, Reid, and Kameda, Tatsuya. 2005. The robust beauty of majority rules in group decisions. Psychological Review 112: 494–508.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kandel, Eric R., Schwartz, James H., and Jessell, Thomas M. 1995. Essentials of neural science and behavior. Norwalk, CT: Appleton and Lange.Google Scholar
Kreps, David, and Wilson, Robert. 1982. Sequential equilibria. Econometrica 50: 863–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuklinski, James H. ed. 2001. Citizens and Politics: Perspectives from Political Psychology. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuklinski, James H., ed. 2002. Thinking about political psychology. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lupia, Arthur, McCubbins, Mathew D., and Popkin, Samuel L. 2000. Beyond rationality: Reason and the study of politics. In Elements of reason: Cognition, choice, and the bounds of rationality, eds. Arthur, Lupia, McCubbins, Mathew D., and Popkin, Samuel L., 1–20. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacCoun, Robert J. 1989. Experimental research on jury decision making. Science 244: 1046–9.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McKelvey, Richard D., and Palfrey, Thomas R. 1995. Quantal response equilibria in normal form games. Games and Economic Behavior 10: 6–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Myerson, Roger B. 2006. Game-theoretic consistency and international relations. Journal of Theoretical Politics 18: 416–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nash, John. 1950. Equilibrium points in n-person games. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 36: 48–9.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pearce, David G. 1984. Rationalizable strategic behavior and the problem of perfection. Econometrica 52: 1029–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pennington, Nancy, and Hastie, Reid. 1990. Practical implications of psychological research on juror and jury decision making. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 16: 90–105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pennington, Nancy, and Hastie, Reid. 1993. Reasoning in explanation-based decision making. Cognition 49: 123–63.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rubinstein, Ariel. 1998. Modeling bounded rationality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Satz, Debra, and Ferejohn, John. 1994. Rational choice and social theory. Journal of Philosophy 91: 71–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schacter, Daniel L. 1996. Searching for memory: The brain, the mind, and the past. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Schacter, Daniel L. 2001. The seven sins of memory: How the mind forgets and remembers. Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin.Google Scholar
Tingley, Dustin. 2005. Self-confirming equilibria in political science: Cognitive foundations and conceptual issues. Philadelphia, PA. Paper presented at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association.Google Scholar
Turner, Mark. 2000. Backstage cognition in reason and choice. In Elements of reason: Cognition, choice and the bounds of rationality, eds. Arthur, Lupia, McCubbins, Mathew D., and Popkin, Samuel L., 264–86. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Turner, Mark. 2001. Cognitive dimensions of social science. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wegener, Duane T., Kerr, Norbert L., Fleming, Monique A., and Petty, Richard E. 2000. Flexible corrections of juror judgments: Implications for jury instructions. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 6: 629–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar