On the economics of trials: adversarial process, evidence, and equilibrium bias

The adversarial provision of evidence is modeled as a game inwhich two parties engage in strategic sequential search. Anaxiomatic approach is used to characterize a court's decisionbased on the evidence provided. Although this process treatsthe evidence submissions in an unbiased way, the equilibriumoutcome may still exhibit bias. Bias arises from differencesin the cost of sampling or asymmetry in the sampling distribution.In a multistage model, a prodefendant bias arises in the firststage from a divergence between the parties' stakes. Finally,the adversarial process generates additional costs that screenout some otherwise meritorious cases.