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Social Science 6317
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"(Not) Canceling Out the Cross Section: Mitigating the Effect of Peremptory Challenges on Jury Composition"
The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees a criminal defendant the right to an impartial jury. According to current precedent, this requires individual jurors to be unbiased and the jury to have a fair possibility of being a representative cross-section of the community. I show that current selection procedures systematically exclude distinctive groups, thus making it impossible to achieve a representative cross-section. I argue that this violates the right to an impartial jury, and I propose an alternative jury selection procedure which eliminates the distortion created by the current system, including any distortion in the composition that arises from unconstitutional challenges that are based on the race or gender of the prospective juror. The new procedure also reduces the variance of the seated jury relative to a random selection, when measuring variance by distance to the median jury, which makes the application of justice less arbitrary. Data from Mississippi and Louisiana are analyzed to support the results.
"Manipulation of Stable Matching Mechanisms: Polarization of Interests Revisited"
In a many-to-one matching market in which the ``college'' side of the market has responsive preferences, I define college improvement cycles, which I show are related to the successful manipulation of stable mechanisms. Specifically, I show that if there exists any individual college that can successfully manipulate a stable mechanism, then there exists a group manipulation in which all colleges are weakly better off than they would be under their own best individual manipulations, and every college is weakly better off relative to the match produced by the stable mechanism under the true preferences. This result provides motivation for why the ``college'' side of a many-to-one matching market would collude when facing a stable mechanism.
This paper uses data from felony jury trials in North Carolina to show that (i) the race and gender composition of the randomly selected jury pool has a significant effect on the probability of conviction, (ii) attorneys adjust peremptory challenge strategies in accordance, and (iii) State peremptory challenges have a positive impact on the conviction rate when the defendant is a black male. Jury pools with higher proportions white men are more likely to convict black male defendants relative to white male defendants. Jury pools with a higher proportion of black men are more likely to acquit all defendants, especially black men. Attorneys use peremptory challenges strategically in accordance with these results, which are robust to a wide set of controls, including county and judge fixed effects. Each State peremptory challenge is correlated with a 2.4-2.9 percentage point increase in the conviction rate when the defendant is black.
We study mechanisms for allocating objects to pairs of agents when agents may have nontrivial preferences over objects and pairings. In this environment, the mechanism may distort agents' preferences over pairings. Compared to certain distortive mechanisms, a non-distortive one always has a stable allocation in our model, and selects stable outcomes that are ex ante more efficient under a regularity condition on the distribution of pair values.
I examine how peremptory challenges, which are vetoes that attorneys may use on prospective jurors, affect jury composition. The purpose of peremptory challenges is to eliminate biased jurors, however I show that under the two most common rules used in the United States peremptory challenges make biased juries more likely. I show that if unanimity is required for conviction, the distribution of juror types is symmetric, and each attorney has the same number of challenges, then challenges benefit the prosecution.
"Contracts v. Colleagues in Matching"- International Journal of Game Theory, 2015, 44(1), p. 209-223
I introduce a general many-to-one matching framework which includes the matching with contracts model as well as models of matching with preferences over colleagues as special cases. I show that this general model can be embedded into the model with contracts, and the model with contracts can be embedded in the model with preferences over colleagues, thus the models are equivalent, and all results from the many-to-one matching with preferences over colleagues literature and the model with contracts literature can be applied to each other.
In the many-to-one matching model with contracts, I show that there is no restriction on preferences weaker than substitutable preferences which guarantees that the set of stable allocations is a lattice. Thus, when contracts are not substitutes, removing agents from the economy may decrease the payoffs to existing agents on both sides of the market.
In the many-to-one matching model with contracts, I provide new necessary and new sufficient conditions for the existence of a stable allocation. These conditions strengthen and weaken known results by exploiting the fact that one side of the market has strict preferences over individual contracts.