This note establishes that escalating penalty regimes with the option to self-report crimes may allow present-biased offenders to obligate themselves to refrain from committing future crimes. Self-reporting of a committed crime increases the expected costs of future criminal opportunities,...

This paper investigates whether providing strong cooperation incentives only at the outset of a group interaction spills over to later periods to ensure cooperation in the long run. We study a repeated linear public-good game with punishment opportunities and a parameter change after the first...

This paper demonstrates that increasing the expected sanction for a crime may increase this crime's prevalence, using a principal–agent model with different kinds of crime that is typical of organized crime. The intuition for the finding is that the policy change may increase the principal's...