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Perjury versus Truth-Revelation: Quantity or Quality of Testimony

Winand Emons

Diskussionsschriften from Universitaet Bern, Departement Volkswirtschaft

Abstract: In trials witnesses often slant their testimony to advance their interests.To obtain truthful testimony, courts rely on perjury rules. We show that perjury rules are not truth-revealing and we derive a truth-revealing mechanism for the same set of restrictions under which perjury rules operate. If the judge uses a truth-revealing mechanism, he will get less testimony than under perjury because the defendant will not present a witness with unfavorable news; however, testimony is of higher quality. We show that 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 lower quantity of testimony is taken into account.

Keywords: litigation process; witness; truth-revelation; mechanism design; perjury rule (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D82 K41 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2001-09
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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https://repec.vwiit.ch/dp/dp0103.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Perjury versus Truth Revelation: Quantity or Quality of Testimony (2005) Downloads
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ube:dpvwib:dp0103

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