Fairness and self-reporting in optimal law enforcement

This paper shows that fairness concerns are a stand-alone driver of self-reporting as part of optimal law enforcement. If society cares about individuals who are wrongly acquitted or are wrongly convicted, self-reporting is advantageous. This continues to hold as we allow for fairness concerns regarding the sanction applied to convicted offenders. We furthermore show that the addition of the traditional enforcement costs argument unambiguously lowers the self-reporting sanction in comparison to the case in which only fairness aspects are considered.

Insurance, Pooling, and Resistance to Reform: The Case of Individual Uncertainty

This paper shows that individual risk-type uncertainty can prevent reforms of the insurance system that would benefit the majority of individuals. We consider the case where a subset of the population is uncertain of their risk type and contrast two insurance regimes the status quo of mandated pooling of all risk types and the reform proposal being insurance with risk-type separation over time, using Bayesian updating. Most individuals would benefit from the reform since their risk type is better than the average but the reform does not occur due to individual uncertainty.individual uncertainty

Victim Interdependence in the Accident Setting

This paper considers the case that potential victims affect each other by taking care. Analyzing standard liability rules, we show that strict liability with a defense of contributory negligence is in the best position to induce the efficient outcome, i.e., this liability rule ensures efficiency if victims affect each other negatively - care by one victim increases the accident exposure of other victims - and makes the attainment likely if victims affect each other positively - if care by one victim decreases the accident exposure of other victims. In contrast, the other standard liability rules fail to induce first-best care.victim interdependence, care incentives, liability rules, tort law,

Tempting Righteous Citizens? On the Counterintuitive Effects of Increasing Sanctions

This paper demonstrates that increasing the expected sanctions for a crime may increase this crime's prevalence, using a principal-agent model with different crimes. The intuition is that the policy change may increase the principal's expected payoff from crime by decreasing the information rent required by the agent.Crime, principal-agent relation, information rent

The Monopolistic Polluter under Environmental Liability Law: Incentives for Abatement and R&D

This paper analyzes the output, abatement, and investment decisions made by a monopolistic polluter under environmental liability law. The model applied considers both integrated and end-of-pipe abatement technologies. We find that in the case of fixed technology, in many instances negligence produces more favorable results than strict liability in terms of social welfare. The reason is that output under strict liability is always less than first-best output, whereas output under negligence is not similarly limited. However, this ranking of liability rules may be reversed when technology is endogenous. Under such conditions investment in both integrated and end-of-pipe abatement technologies under negligence is guided by motives foreign to the social planner, whereas the polluter's calculus under strict liability is similar to that of the social planner.

Market Liberalization, Regulatory Uncertainty, and Firm Investment

Motivated by the German postal market, this paper analyzes the effects of regulatory uncertainty about labor costs for investment into a liberalized market. We distinguish between the external investment margin (market entry) and the internal investment margin (technology) and establish that regulatory uncertainty affects these margins differently, encouraging market entry but discouraging investment at the internal margin. As a consequence, the impact of regulatory uncertainty on competition in liberalized markets is the result of these two countervailing forces.regulatory uncertainty, investment, market entry, minimum wage

On the path-dependence of tax compliance

This paper presents experimental evidence that tax compliance is path dependent. We show that individuals faced with the same current tax enforcement parameters, will nevertheless choose different compliance if they have faced different tax enforcement parameters in the past. This finding has important policy implications. For instance, legal harmonization in the EU cannot be expected to reliably yield similar behavior in countries with different legal histories.tax compliance, path dependence, experiment

On the Interaction of Individual and Collective Crime

This paper shows that increasing the sanction on collective crime may increase its prevalence. This situation arises when individuals can commit crimes both individually and as part of a collective. Our result is based on an interdependence between detection probabilities where detection of an individual crime may result in the uncovering of the collective crime as well.Law enforcement, Crime, Collective Crime

Emotions in Litigation Contests

This paper introduces the concept of emotions into the standard litigation contest. Positive (negative) emotions emerge when litigants win (lose) at trial and are dependent in particular on the level of defendant fault. Our findings establish that standard results of litigation contests change significantly when emotions are taken into account. We show that emotions may increase or decrease individual and total equilibrium contest effort, introduce an asymmetry into the contest, and reinforce or weaken a plaintiff’s incentives to bring a suit. In addition, we consider how emotions impact on justice.emotions, litigation contest, trial, defendant fault

Switching Consumers and Product Liability: On the Optimality of Incomplete Strict Liability

This article shows that it may be socially optimal to grant accident victims less than full compensation. In our framework, firms are liable under product liability but also invest in care to prevent consumers switching to competitors. Affecting the partition of consumers by means of care-taking is not desirable from a social standpoint. Consequently, it may be optimal to reduce liability below full compensation in order to adjust firms’ care incentives.Tort law; product liability, care level, asymmetric information, switching