This paper examines the use of fines and imprisonment to deter individuals from engaging in harmful activities. These sanctions are analyzed separately as well as together, first for identical risk-neutral individuals and then for two groups of risk-neutral individuals who differ by wealth. When...

This article analyzes corruption of law enforcement agents: payment of bribes to agents so that they will not report violations. Corruption dilutes deterrence because bribe payments are less than sanctions. The state may not be able to offset this effect of bribery by raising sanctions for the...

This paper analyzes optimal fines in a model in which individuals can commit up to two offenses. The fine for the second offense is allowed to differ from the fine for the first offense. There are four natural cases in the model, defined by assumptions about the gains to individuals from...

Some of the costs of enforcing laws are fixed" - - in the sense that they do not depend on the number of individuals who commit harmful acts- -while other costs are "variable"- - they rise with the number of such individuals. This article analyzes the effects of fixed and variable enforcement...

We derive the sentence--choosing among the sanctions of prison, parole, and probation--that achieves a target level of deterrence at least cost. Potential offenders discount the future disutility of sanctions and the state discounts the future costs of sanctions. Prison has higher disutility and...

In nuisance-type cases, legal commentators generally recommend -- and the courts seem to increasingly use -- the award of damages rather than the granting of an injunction of the harmed party. This essay compares the economic consequences of injunctive and damage remedies under a variety of...

The prison time actually served by a convicted criminal depends to a significant degree on decisions made by the state during the course of imprisonment--on whether to grant parole or other forms of sentence reduction. In this article we study a model of the adjustment of sentences assuming that...

This article studies the optimal use of fines and imprisonment when an offender's level of wealth is private information that cannot be observed by the enforcement authority. In a model in which there are two levels of wealth, I derive the optimal mix of sanctions, including the imprisonment...

This paper studies the interactions between an individual's self esteem and his social environment in the workplace, at school, and in personal relationships. Because a person generally has only imperfect knowledge of his own abilities, people who derive benefits from his performance (parent,...