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Section 3:
Means and Medians
Trial Award Patterns
Probability
Standard Deviation
Normal Distributions
Logarithms
Awards Test
 

Standard deviation

Means and medians provide little indication of the “spread” of observations about the central figure.

The stream of numbers consisting of 10, 10, 10 has a mean of 10. So does the stream of numbers consisting of 0, 0, 30. The mean by itself oversimplifies, in the sense that it does not provide a measure of the difference between these two different streams of numbers.

The standard deviation does measure such difference. Very roughly speaking, the range from the high value to the low value of the stream equals about four standard deviations.

Table 1 shows that the standard deviation of awards in jury trials is noticeably higher than the standard deviation of awards in judge trials, for both compensatory and punitive damages. This means that jury awards show a bigger range, or more variation, than judge awards. We need not worry here about precisely computing the standard deviations, so accept them as given in Table 1.

Table 1. Jury and Judge Trial Award Patterns
(in thousands of dollars)

 
Mean
Median
Number of Plaintiff Awards
Standard Deviation
 
Jury
Judge
Jury
Judge
Jury
Judge
Jury
Judge
Compensatory damages
1,047
152
45
25
3,001
1,375
34,200
979
Punitive damages
1,870
547
50
30
121
55
12,900
3,394



 
Copyright © 2002 by Theodore Eisenberg & Kevin M. Clermont
Cornell University
Cornell Law School
Cornell University
Comments to ted@teddy.law.cornell.edu
Last updated: September 2002