Papers

You can also find my articles on my Google Scholar profile.

Published Papers

Prosecutorial Discretion: A Theoretical and Experimental Investigation

Published in Social Choice and Welfare, 2025

How does restricting prosecutorial discretion affect the criminal justice system? Many legal scholars have suggested that setting a minimum plea bargain can reduce the innocence problem (i.e., reduce the number of false convictions in the criminal justice system). We develop a model of the criminal justice system to address this suggestion. We show theoretically that setting a minimum plea bargain can both reduce the innocence problem and slightly reduce crime rates. We implement this model in a laboratory experiment and find that restricting prosecutorial discretion reduces the innocence problem, but has no effect on crime rates. Additionally, we find an unintended consequence of restricting prosecutorial discretion: there is a significant decrease in the rate at which guilty individuals accept plea bargains.

Recommended citation: Hudja, S., Ralston, J., Aimone, J.A. et al. Prosecutorial discretion: a theoretical and experimental investigation. Soc Choice Welf (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-025-01641-7
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Bias, Trust, and Trustworthiness: An Experimental Study of Post Justice System Outcomes

Published in Review of Law and Economics, 2025

The stigma attached to any criminal record, including for those found not guilty, can lead to reduced job prospects and economic hardship long after judicial proceedings conclude. This paper examines discriminatory behavior of experimental participants who are given the opportunity to base an investment or employment decision on their trustee’s/worker’s criminal record. Similar to the real world, our experiment shows that employers and investors discriminate against those with criminal convictions. Surprisingly, we find they also discriminate against those with acquittals. We find that a subject’s reciprocity corresponds significantly to the true guilt or innocence of an accused, but not to conviction or acquittal of a crime. Because reciprocator behavior does not depend on a person’s criminal record, no rational basis exists for the observed statistical discrimination against those who have been accused. Our results raise serious concerns about the practice of using criminal records in hiring, as convictions are often poor indicators of actual culpability.

Recommended citation: Ralston, Jason; Aimone, Jason; Rentschler, Lucas; North, Charles, North. (2025). "Bias, Trust, and Trustworthiness: An Experimental Study of Post Justice System Outcomes." Review of Law and Economics.
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Reasonable Doubt

Published in Encyclopedia of Experimental Social Science, 2024

A survey of literature on jurors reasonable doubt thresholds in experimental psychology and economics.

Recommended citation: Ralston, Jason; Hudja, Stanton. (2024). "Reasonable Doubt." Encyclopedia of Experimental Social Science. Forthcoming.
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An experimental exploration of reasonable doubt

Published in Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2023

The “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard is a constitutional requirement in U.S. criminal cases, but jury instructions on “reasonable doubt” vary across jurisdictions. We use a controlled experiment to analyze the relationship between the definition of reasonable doubt and juror decisions. In our novel (pre-registered) experiment, we vary the definition of reasonable doubt between subjects and elicit the level of evidence required for subjects to convict a defendant. We analyze juror decisions under two state definitions that are markedly different (Wisconsin and West Virginia) and analyze juror decisions when reasonable doubt is not explicitly defined. We find similar behavior in each treatment. We ran three additional treatments to determine why behavior does not seem to vary across definitions. Our data is consistent with subjects having pre-conceived notions of reasonable doubt that are not affected by jury instructions.

Recommended citation: Aimone, Jason; Hudja, Stanton; Law, Wilson; North, Charles; Ralston, Jason; Rentschler, Lucas. (2023). "An experimental exploration of reasonable doubt." Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. 212.
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Prosecutor plea bargaining and conviction rate structure: evidence from an experiment

Published in Public Choice, 2023

We present a model of plea bargaining and vary the value a prosecutor places on a conviction obtained via plea bargain relative to a conviction obtained at trial. We show that increasing the relative value of a plea bargain increases the trial penalty and decreases the severity of the equilibrium plea bargain. We report the results of an exploratory experiment which assesses this prediction in a more realistic setting, in which subjects are incentivized by conviction rates. Our treatment variable is whether convictions obtained via plea bargain are included in conviction rate calculations. Including plea bargains in conviction rates increases the number of plea offers made and increases the trial penalty, which is qualitatively in line with our predictions.

Recommended citation: Ralston, Jason; Aimone, Jason; Rentschler, Lucas; North, Charles (2023). "Prosecutor plea bargaining and conviction rate structure: evidence from an experiment." Public Choice. 196.
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Innovate versus imitate: Theory and experimental evidence

Published in Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2020

We model and experimentally evaluate the trade-off between innovation and imitation commonly faced by firms. Innovation involves searching for a high payoff opportunity, but paying a cost in order to do so. Imitation involves avoiding that search cost and copying the most successful payoff opportunity uncovered thus far. We formulate a novel model of sequential innovation versus imitation decisions made by a group of n regret minimizing agents. We analyze the consequences of complete versus incomplete information about the distribution of payoffs from innovation on agents’ decisions. We then study these predictions in a laboratory experiment where we find evidence in support of our theoretical predictions.

Recommended citation: Duffy, John; Ralston, Jason. (2020). "Innovate versus imitate: Theory and experimental evidence." Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. 177.
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Submitted Papers

Errors in the Pursuit of Justice: An Experimental Study of Type I and Type II Trade-offs

Submitted to Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2025

This paper investigates how individuals make trade-offs between two types of judicial error: Type I errors (wrongful convictions) and Type II errors (wrongful acquittals). We introduce a novel experimental framework that isolates participants’ preferences in the absence of legal guidance or institutional framing. In a stylized justice task, participants are given limited resources to allocate toward reducing each type of error, allowing us to observe how they prioritize fairness and punishment under constraint. Study I compares behavior in hypothetical versus consequential settings, while Study II expands the design to explore additional factors, including individual versus population-level framing and the inclusion of past behavior information. We also manipulate both the size of the endowment and the effectiveness of each resource unit, simulating real-world policy trade-offs. Across all treatments, participants consistently prioritize reducing Type I errors, without the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard. Resource effectiveness significantly influences allocation behavior, and we observe systematic demographic differences: men allocate more resources to reducing Type I errors than women. These findings shed light on how individuals approach moral trade-offs in legal contexts and offer implications for institutional design and public support for criminal justice policies.

Authors: Stanton Hudja, Jason Ralston, Siyu Wang, Jason Aimon, Lucas Rentschler, and Charles North

Works in Progress

Stable Experimentation? An Analysis of Multi-Armed Bandit Problems with Bundling

This paper introduces bundled experimentation problems and compares behavior in these problems to a classic (non-bundled) experimentation problem. We transform a two-decision four-armed bandit problem into two different bundling experimentation problems. The first bundling problem is a “stable” problem where each type of urn in the four-armed bandit problem becomes bundled with a known urn of the same quality. The second bundling problem is an “encouraged” problem where the urn types with larger exploration incentives in the four-armed bandit get bundled with urns with higher known reward rates. In our experiment, there should be no differences in the (expected) information generated from the first decision in each type of experimentation problem. However, we find that both types of bundling problems lead to more expected information generated than the non-bundled experimentation problem. Additionally, in contrast to theory, we find that subjects’ second decision in a bundled bandit problem is influenced by the balls drawn from both of the initially chosen options urns. These two results suggest that choice is not preserved when transforming a non-bundled experimentation problem into a bundled experimentation problem.

Authors: Hudja, Stanton and Woods, Daniel and Ralston, Jason, Stable Experimentation? An Analysis of Multi-Armed Bandit Problems with Bundling (November 30, 2025). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=

Jason Ralston