In order to analyze the severity of sentencing, and to show how the probabilistic interpretation of strategic behavior can be tricky, this paper uses the crime strategic model (inspection game) proposed by Tsebelis. This model shows that any attempts to increase the severity of punishment will...

The trade-off between the immediate returns from committing a crime and the future costs of punishment depends on an offender's time discounting. We exploit quasi-experimental variation in sentence length generated by a large collective pardon in Italy and provide non-parametric evidence on the...

In three distinct disciplines, crime and punishment are studied experimentally: in empirical legal studies, in experimental economics, and an experimental criminology. These three disciplines have surprisingly little interaction. The current paper surveys the rich evidence, and discusses the...

This paper uses data from the Gothenburg District Court in Sweden and a research design that exploits the random assignment of politically appointed jurors (termed nämndemän) to make three contributions to the literature on jury decision-making: (i) an assessment of whether systematic biases...

In repeated normal-form (simultaneous-move) games, simple penal codes (Abreu,1986, 1988) permit an elegant characterization of the set of subgame-perfect outcomes. We show that the logic of simple penal codes fails in repeated extensive-form games. By means of examples, we identify two types of...