A theory of hung juries and informative voting

This paper investigates a jury decision when hung juries and retrials are possible. When jurors in subsequent trials know that previous trials resulted in hung juries, informative voting cannot be an equilibrium regardless of voting rules unless the probability that each juror receives the correct signal when the defendant is guilty is identical to the one when he is innocent. Thus, while Coughlan (2000) claims that mistrials facilitate informative voting, our result shows that such an assertion holds only in limited circumstances.