This paper argues that the Economics of Crime concentrates too much on punishment as a policy to fight crime, which is … unwise for several reasons. There are important instances in which punishment simply cannot reduce crime. Several feasible … alternatives to punishment exist, such as offering positive incentives or handing out awards for law abiding behavior. These …

One of the key questions in the study of regulation is whether the costs of regulatory compliance fall homogeneously on …

Direct experience of a peer’s punishment might make non-punished peers reassess the probability and consequences of … facing punishment and hence induce a change in their behavior. We test this mechanism in a setting, China, in which we … observe the reactions to the same peer’s punishment by listed firms with different incentives to react - state …

Research examining the effect of weak punishment on conformity indicates that punishment can backfire and lead to … of social norms and their interplay with weak punishment in the context of a trust game. Across six conditions, we … systematically vary the combination of existence of weak punishment and norm information. Norm information may refer either to what …

The empirical literature testing the economic theory of crime has extensively studied the relative importance of the … probability and the severity of punishment with reference to planned criminal activities. There are, however, also unplanned …

Economic theory suggests that the deterrence of deviant behavior is driven by a combination of severity and certainty … of punishment. This paper presents the first controlled experiment to study a third important factor that has been mainly … will be punished is dissolved and the timing at which the punishment is actually imposed, as well as the combination …

contributions mechanism with punishment (VCMP). We eliminate ‘dynamic economic linkages’ between the two stages of our ‘modified …’ VCMP to rule out other potential explanations. We use a beliefs-based model, rooted in psychological game theory, to derive …