This paper revisits the issue of law enforcement and the design of monetary sanctions when the public law enforcer's incentives depart from those of a benevolent authority, which is the most frequent assumption made in the literature on crime deterrence. We …rst consider the case of an elected...

This paper provides an analysis of two damage rules (Lost Pro…fit versus Unjust Enrichment) introduced in the French Code de la Propriété Intellectuelle in 2007 (Loi du 27 Octobre 2007, Art. L. 615-7). We use a simple sequential game where both the decisions to infringe and to enforce the...

The paper surveys the main criticisms against the economics of crime à la Becker (JPE, 1968). Some of them (external criticisms) are more focused on methological issues, and are mainly addressed by lawyers. Others (internal criticisms) aim at challenging the central result, according to which...

Le droit du licenciement expose-t-il les entreprises françaises à un "risque judiciaire"? L’article discute les arguments des différentes thèses (Blanchard et Tirole (2003), Cahuc et Kramarz (2004), Munoz-Perez et Serverin (2005)) en interprétant les informations empiriques disponibles...

Many industrial accidents result in losses (material damages or bodily injury) that cannot be perfectly compensated by a monetary payment, nor be perfectly insured. Moreover, often injurers control ex ante the magnitude rather than the probability of accidents. We study the characteristics of...

The purpose of this note is to investigate the optimal enforcement of the penal code when criminals invest in a specific class of avoidance activities termed dissembling activities (i.e. self-protection efforts undertaken by criminals to hedge their illegal gains in case of detection and...

This paper extends the analysis of insurance contracts design to the case of "low probability events", when there is a probability mass on the event "no accident-zero loss". The optimality of the deductible clause is discussed both at the theoretical and empirical levels.

Parties engaged in a litigation generally enter the discovery process with different informations regarding their case and/or an unequal endowment in terms of skill and ability to produce evidence and predict the outcome of a trial. Hence, they have to bear different legal costs to assess the...

There is evidence that asymmetric information does exist between litigants: not in a way supporting Bebchuk (1984)’s assumption that defendants’ degree of fault is private information, but more likely as a result of parties’ predictive capacity about the outcome at trial (Osborne, 1999)....

In rent-seeking contests, players are seldom identical to one another. In this chapter, we examine the rent-seeking literature that explores the effects of specific forms of asymmetry between contestants. We consider Tullock’s rent-seeking contests involving two players who differ in strength...