This article surveys the theory of the public enforcement of law -- the use of public agents (inspectors, tax auditors …, police, prosecutors) to detect and to sanction violators of legal rules. We first present the basic elements of the theory … examine a variety of extensions of the central theory, concerning accidental harms, costs of imposing fines, errors, general …

Previous findings on punishment have focused on environments in which the outcomes are known with certainty. In this … paper, we conduct experiments to investigate how punishment affects cooperation in a two-person stochastic prisoner … specified probabilistically under a transparent information condition. In particular, we study two types of punishment …

puzzle in standard economic models. To study this phenomenon, we propose a positive theory of IEAs in which the political … (might not be implemented in full). The theory also provides a new perspective for understanding investments in green …