Cross-Examination

Claude Fluet and Thomas Lanzi

Cahiers de recherche from Centre de recherche sur les risques, les enjeux économiques, et les politiques publiques

Abstract: Two opposed parties seek to infl‡uence an uninformed decision maker. They invest in acquiring information and select what to disclose. The decision maker then adjudicates. We compare this benchmark with a procedure allowing adversarial cross-examination. A cross-examiner tests the opponent in order to persuade the decision maker that the opponent is deceitful. How does the opportunity or threat of cross-examination affect the parties' ’behavior? How does it affect the quality of decision-making? We show that decision-making deteriorates because parties are less likely to acquire information and because cross-examination too often makes the truth appear as falsehood. Next, we consider a form of controlled cross-examination by permitting the cross-examined to be re-examined by his own advocate, i.e., counter-persuasion. More information then reaches the decision maker. Decision-making may or may not improve compared to the benchmark depending on how examination is able to trade off type 1 and 2 errors.

Keywords: : Bayesian persuasion; disclosure game; adversarial; redirect examination; procedural rules. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D71 D82 D83 K41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth, nep-law, nep-mic and nep-ore
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Working Paper: Cross-Examination (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lvl:crrecr:2108

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