This paper empirically examines perceptions of the criminal justice system held by young males using longitudinal survey data from the recent National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 Cohort and the National Youth Survey. While beliefs about the probability of an arrest are positively...

Followers of law, politics and business commonly relate stories of individuals who appear to predict an expected self-performance level below what they believe likely. Candidates, attorneys and firms sometimes seem to under-predict their own capacities. Insofar as individuals typically construct...

The disutility criminals receive from prison varies. Earning early release requires effort which can be used to separate those with the highest disutility from others. Savings from those released early can be used to finance longer prison sentences for others

We model deterrence with costly punishment when criminals have different abilities. Abilities are unobserved by both criminals and the courts. Based on past successes, criminals update their priors on being high-ability criminals. Courts cannot observe a criminal’s total past offenses. They do...

In their 1984 article, “The Selection of Disputes for Litigation,” Priest and Klein famously hypothesized a “tendency toward 50 percent plaintiff victories” among litigated cases. Nevertheless, many scholars doubt the validity of their conclusions, because the model they relied upon does...

We introduce fairness into three models of pretrial settlement and find that it increases the incidence of trial in each. This is true despite the fact that the fairness taste parameter is common knowledge. In the standard model, the party who makes the final offer can extract essentially all of...

We model the strategic interaction between a prosecutor and a defendant when informal sanctions by outside observers (society) may be imposed on both the defendant and the prosecutor. Outside observers rationally use the disposition of the case (plea bargain, case drop, acquittal, or conviction)...

We analyze contingency fees in the Reinganum and Wilde (1986) signaling model of litigation. The effect of contingency fees on settlement depends upon the details of the contingency fee contract and the nature of the informational asymmetry assumed in the model. Introducing bifurcated fee...

We analyze the effects of the evidence standard for search warrants in an economic model of crime and search. If the warrant standard is initially below a certain positive threshold, increasing it actually reduces crime as well as searches. Moreover, the positive threshold is higher if searches...

We analyze the design of legal principles and procedures for court decision-making in civil litigation. The objective is the provision of appropriate incentives for potential tort-feasors to exert care, when evidence about care is imperfect and may be distorted by the parties. Efficiency is...