Perjury versus Truth-Revelation: Quantity or Quality of Testimony
نویسندگان
چکیده
In trials witnesses often slant their testimony to advance their interests. To obtain truthful testimony, courts rely on perjury rules. We show that truth-revelation is possible and that perjury rules are not truth-revealing. If the judge uses a truth-revealing mechanism, he will get little testimony because the defendant will not present a witness with unfavorable news; however, testimony is of high quality. Under perjury the court gets a different amount of testimony with lower informational content. A court striving for precision prefers truth-revelation to perjury. If the court is rational in the Bayesian sense, chances for the defendant to prevail are the same under perjury and truth-revelation from an ex ante point of view. Truth-revelation thus dominates perjury even when the different quantity of testimony is taken into account.
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