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 …

Regulation and the negligence rule are both designed to obtain compliance with desired standards of behavior, but they … differ in a primary respect: compliance with regulation is ordinarily assessed independently of the occurrence of harm … use of the negligence rule is triggered by harm, the rule enjoys an intrinsic enforcement cost advantage over regulation …

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 …

vigilante justice, as represented by peer-to-peer punishment, to delegated policing, as represented by the "hired gun" mechanism …

observation that cartels keep participants in line through the threat of punishment, but they fail to explain two important … it is detected. We propose a theory of "equilibrium price cutting and business stealing" in cartels to bridge this gap … between theory and observation …

We introduce the possibility of direct punishment by specialized enforcers into a model of community enforcement … specialized enforcement technology is sufficiently effective, cooperation is best sustained by a “single enforcer punishment … punishment that enforcers are willing to impose on deviators. Conversely, when the specialized enforcement technology is …