A model of harassment bribes (paid for services one is entitled to) is developed and used to analyze the recent proposal to legalize paying bribes while increasing fines on accepting bribes. We explore performance as regards corruption deterrence and public service provision. A modified scheme,...

In most jurisdictions, antitrust fines are based on affected commerce rather than on collusive profits, and in some others, caps on fines are introduced based on total firm sales rather than on affected commerce. We uncover a number of distortions that these policies generate, propose simple...

When penalties for first-time offenders are restricted, it is typically optimal for the lawmaker to overdeter repeat offenders. First-time offenders are then deterred not only by the (restricted) fine for a first offense, but also by the prospect of a large fine for a subsequent offense. Now...

This paper reports results from an experiment studying how fines, leniency programs and reward schemes for whistleblowers affect cartel formation and prices. Antitrust without leniency reduces cartel formation, but increases cartel prices: subjects use costly fines as (altruistic) punishments....

We consider an economy where property rights are necessary to ensure sufficient rewards to ex-ante investments. Because enforcement of property rights influences the ex-post distribution of rents, there is room for corruption. We characterize the optimal organization of society and the optimal...

We study the consequences of leniency - reduced legal sanctions for wrongdoers who spontaneously self-report to law enforcers - on sequential, bilateral, illegal transactions such as corruption, manager-auditor collusion, or drug deals. It is known that leniency helps to deter illegal...

We review current methods for calculating fines against cartels in the US and EU, and simulate their deterrence effects under different assumptions on the legal and economic environment. It is likely that European fines have not had significant deterrence effects before leniency programs were...

Leniency programmes (or policies) reduce sanctions against cartel members that self-report to the Antitrust Authority. We focus on their ability to directly deter cartels and analogous criminal organizations by undermining internal trust, increasing individual incentives to ‘cheat’ on...

During the transition from plan to market, managers and politicians succeeded in maintaining control of large parts of the stock of socialist physical capital. Despite the obvious importance of this phenomenon, there have been no efforts to model, measure and investigate this process...

We present a simple model to analyse law enforcement problems in transition economies. Law enforcement implies coordination problems and multiplicity of equilibria due to a law abidance and a fiscal externality. We analyse two institutional mechanisms for solving the coordination problem. A...