 Judicial Torture as a Screening DeviceKong-Pin Chen and Tsung-Sheng Tsai () The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics, 2015, vol. 15, issue 2, 277-312 Abstract: Judicial torture to extract information or to elicit a confession was a common practice in pre-modern societies, both in the east and the west. This paper proposes a positive theory for judicial torture. It is shown that torture reflects the magistrate’s attempt to balance type I and type II errors in the decision-making, by forcing the guilty to confess with a higher probability than the innocent, and thereby decreases the type I error at the cost of the type II error. Moreover, there is a non-monotonic relationship between the superiority of torture and the informativeness of investigation: when investigation is relatively uninformative, an improvement in technology used in the investigation actually lends an advantage to torture so that torture is even more attractive to the magistrates; however, when technological progress reaches a certain threshold, the advantage of torture is weakened, so that a judicial system based on torture becomes inferior to one based on evidence. This result can explain the historical development of the judicial system. Keywords: torture; type I and type II errors; evidence (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:bejtec:v:15:y:2015:i:2:p:277-312:n:8 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics is currently edited by Burkhard C. Schipper More articles in The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics from De Gruyter |
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