Condorcet’s Jury Theorem as a Rational Justification of Soft Paternalistic Consumer Policies

Abstract

The aim of this note is to revisit the meaningfulness of the Condorcet Jury Theorem (CJT) and apply it to the recent debate on liberal paternalism and consumer protection. The CJT consists of two parts, (a) stating that a jury of experts is always more competent than a single expert given a certain level of competence, and (b) asserting that for large juries, the collective competence approaches infallibility. This note argues that these insights suggest the application of a Condorcet jury voting procedure in case of nudging boundedly rational consumers. The note proposes a simple calculus for finding an optimal jury size and advocates consumers' meta-preferences as the jury's evaluative dimension for designing soft paternalistic policies.