Fairness and self-reporting in optimal law enforcement

Abstract

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.