This paper extends Malik's (1990) analysis to the case where criminals' avoidance efforts and public expenditures in the detection of criminals are strategic complements in the aggregate technology of control of illegal behaviours. In this set up, we show that whenever criminals' avoidance...

In this paper, we modelize a criminal organization as an agency where the Principal and the Agent have different sensibilities towards the risk of arrestation and punishment, and at the same time have different skills with respect to general organization tasks, crime realization or detection...

This paper revisits the issue of the unilateral divorce law, taking into account that: 1/ the decisions to engage in marriage and then to divorce or to stay married are fundamentally sequential decisions; 2/ household consumption has a large joint component, generating economies of scale. The...

The objective of the paper is to analyze the risk management behavior of a non-industrial private forest owner under uncertainty about timber production. Two types of hedging strategies with harvesting decisions are studied: a financial practice versus a physical one. We develop a two-period...

When several plaintiffs file individually a lawsuit against the same tortfeasor, the resolution of the various cases through repeated trials produces positive informational externalities, which benefit to the later plaintiffs (since there exist precedents, jurisprudence...). Thus, the first...

We compare the influence of bankruptcy law on the risk of default and the rate of liquidation by banks. We show that it depends on whether it is pro-creditors or pro-debtors oriented, and on the intensity of competition between banks. Then , we analyse the various tools at the disposal of public...

Our paper addresses the question of the deterrent effect of a monetary sanction associated to a collective rather than an individual liability, when crimes are realized within a hierarchical gang (defined as a criminal organization where the leader is a sleeping partner, and several agents are...

For contemporary legal theory, law is essentially an interpretative and hermeneutic practice (Ackerman (1991), Horwitz (1992)). A straightforward consequence is that legal disputes between parties are motivated by their divergent interpretations regarding what law says on their case. This point...

For psychologists, bounded rationality reflects the presence of cognitive dissonance and/or inconsistency, revealing that people use heuristics (Tversky and Kahneman (1974)) rather than sophisticated processes for the assessment of their beliefs. Recent research analyzing litigations and...

This papers studies three questions. What do we know about criminals 'preferences ? How should we represent such preferences ? What are the consequences for law enforcement policies ?