Seemingly irrelevant information? The impact of legal team size on third party perceptions
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-2022
Journal Title
International Review of Law and Economics
ISSN
0144-8188
DOI
10.1016/j.irle.2022.106068
Abstract
People often appear to use irrelevant information in forming judgments about others. Using survey experiments, we show that seemingly irrelevant facts may actually be informative of actors’ choices, which third parties can use to update their beliefs. Specifically, we show that subjects’ perceived severity and recommended punishment for offenses are significantly increasing in the number of lawyers representing defendants. However, once subjects are informed that the defendant was randomly assigned a specific number of lawyers, the significant relationship between the perceived seriousness of the offense and the number of lawyers largely vanishes. Thus, third parties in our benchmark analysis may be using the defendant’s legal team size as a proxy to update their beliefs regarding the nature of the offense committed, as opposed to being affected by irrelevant factors in forming judgments. This is because randomization makes it impossible for third parties to draw inferences regarding the nature of the offense committed by the defendant based on the number of lawyers. However, for some offenses, we find that increasing the number of lawyers raises third parties’ recommended sanctions even when the number of lawyers is randomly determined, which is consistent with a psychological phenomenon called ‘luck envy’.
First Page
106068
Volume Number
71
Publisher
Elsevier
Recommended Citation
Gilles Grolleau, Murat C. Mungan & Naoufel Mzoughi,
Seemingly irrelevant information? The impact of legal team size on third party perceptions,
71
Int'l Rev. L. & Econ.
106068
(2022).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/facscholar/1832