Strategic behavior at trial : the production, reporting, and evaluation of complex evidence

Abstract

Recent game-theoretic analyses of the adversarial process have focused on the ability of courts to render accurate verdicts in light of selectively reported evidence. This paper generalizes previous work by developing a game where the court’s decision to weigh evidence and litigants’ information-gathering and reporting strategies are endogenously determined, and examines the effects on the players’ equilibrium strategies of varying the informational endowments of the litigants concerning the true value of the parameter under dispute. We find that litigants’ strategies are driven by their knowledge of the court’s potential strategic behavior and prior beliefs, which are non-neutral with respect to trial results.