Can Imprisonment Be Cheaper? The Law and Economics of Private Prisons

Custody is the most expensive method of punishment in the western world, as compared to other alternatives. Although expensive, prison is an indispensible instrument to deal with judgment proof or dangerous offenders. Hence, by using the law and economics approach, this paper explores prison privatization as an instrument for less expensive incarceration. This method has the potential to reduce the prison costs without hampering its quality. However, a restructuring of the current contracts is needed to achieve this purpose. The attention given to the topic of private prisons by the law and economics scholars, especially in the European context, is limited and this paper attempts to fill this gap. The present paper applies arguments from the bureaucracy and political science literature to explain the inefficiencies of public prisons. Subsequently, the potential problems of private prisons are presented through the principle-agent model and solutions are offered

Any-Where Any-Time: Ambiguity and the Perceived Probability of Apprehension

Enforcement is a costly endeavor. Thus, governments ought to be innovative in designing less costly policies, yet, effective in preventing crime. To this end, this paper suggests using insights from behavioral law and economics. Empirical evidence demonstrates that police have an important effect in deterring crime. However, increasing the number of policemen is a costly policy. Therefore, this paper explores policy changes, which exploit offender’s ambiguity aversion in order to reduce crime without increasing the police force. Namely, empirical evidence suggests that criminals are better deterred by ambiguous detection. Thus, this paper analyzes the ways to randomize the apprehension strategies to meet this end. Furthermore, it provides new evidence, based on a survey carried out for the purpose of this paper, that potential violators are largely not aware of policy changes. Inasmuch as the information regarding the intensified uncertainty is essential to its success, this paper discusses the possibility to increase criminals’ awareness through the “availability heuristic.

Day fines: asymmetric information and the secondary enforcement system

The most common pecuniary sanction, i.e. fixed-fines, places an emphasis on the severity of the crime. This fine has the problem of being either too high for poorer offenders to pay or too low for the richer offenders to be deterred. Day-fines, on the other hand, systematically account for the financial situation of the offender as well as for the severity of his offense. Consequently, it imposes equivalent burden of punishment on offenders who committed similar crimes, regardless of their wealth. However, a problem of asymmetric information is raised. Accurate financial information is essential for the efficiency of day-fines, yet its collection is costly. Day-fines receive increasing attention from policy-makers around the world. Nonetheless, it is under-researched in the law and economics literature. Therefore, this article is the first to formally analyze the problem of asymmetric information in the context of day-fines and to develop an optimal secondary enforcement system that would incentivize criminals to provide accurate information regarding their wealth

Don't believe it! A global perspective on cognitive reflection and conspiracy theories about COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic increased the saliency of an old phenomenon – conspiracy theories. In times of a global crisis and an unprecedented access to information, fake news seems to spread as fast as the virus. A global pandemic requires more than ever self-compliance. Only behavior change and vaccination on a large scale can bring us to normality. Yet believing in conspiracy theories about COVID-19 is expected to undermine such compliance. What determines susceptibility to believing in misinformation? In this study, using data on mostly representative samples of 45 countries around the world (38,113 participants), we found evidence that people with more deliberate thinking are less likely to believe in conspiracy theories. Furthermore, on the individual level people who are more prone to believe in conspiracy theories are less likely to comply with behavior change. We are in the midst of the biggest coordination game and such insights in social psychology can inform policymakers

Current issues of conformity of cements

Данная статья посвящена вопросам перехода цемента из добровольной области регулирования в область обязательного подтверждения соответствия. Однако многие производители оказались не готовы к таким изменениям. Основной причиной этого явилось ненадлежащее состояние технологической документации, требуемой в обязательном порядке для подтверждения соответствияThis article focuses on the transition of the cement from the voluntary sector management in the area of mandatory confirmation of compliance. However, many producers were not ready to such changes. The main reason for this was inadequate maintenance of technical documentation required for obligatory confirmation of complianc

Calculation of mutual information for nonlinear optical fiber communication channel at large SNR within path-integral formalism

Using the path-integral technique we calculate the mutual information for the fiber optical channel modelled by the nonlinear Schrö dinger equation with additive Gaussian noise. At large signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) we present the mutual information through the path-integral which is convenient for the perturbative expansion both in nonlinearity and dispersion. In the leading order in 1/SNR we demonstrate that the mutual information is determined through the averaged logarithm of the normalization factor Λ of the conditional probability density function P[Y|X]. In the limit of small noise and small nonlinearity we derive analytically the first nonzero nonlinear correction to the mutual information for the channel. For the arbitrary nonlinearity we restrict the mutual information by the low bound obtained from the Jensen's inequality and analyze the bound for the case of large dispersion

THE QUALITY OF GLUTEN-FREE FLOUR PRODUCTS IN THE CONSUMER MARKET OF KUZBASS

The paper presents data on the range of gluten-free flour products sold in the consumer market of Kuzbass by well-known federal chains. The quality and range of products are organically linked as indicators of the quality of life for certain categories of people. Expansion of the assortment of specialized flour products of the domestic assortment has been established.В работе представлены данные по ассортименту безглютеновых мучных изделий, реализуемых на потребительском рынке Кузбасса известными федеральными сетями. Качество и ассортимент продукции органически соединяются как показатели качества жизни для некоторых категорий людей. Установлено расширение ассортимента специализированных мучных изделий отечественного ассортимента, удовлетворение потребительского спроса на специализированные продукты питания