Prosecutor and lawyers in plea bargaining with complete information

In criminal law, when a conflict is solved by plea bargaining, the negotiation is mainly made between the prosecutor and the lawyer. Adopting a complete information framework about his type (selfish or altruistic), this paper compares two lawyer payment systems: flat fees and hourly-wage fees. We identify the system of fees in which the sentence is the lowest. We first show that under flat fees the prosecutor provides less effort when he faces an altruistic lawyer. Second, we show that under some conditions an altruistic lawyer may accept a higher sentence than a selfish lawyer.