Regulation as Punishment

Punishment as Contract

This paper provides a sketch of a contractarian approach to punishment, according to a version of contractarianism one might call “rational contractarianism,” by contrast with the normative contractarianism of John Rawls. Rational contractarianism suggests a model according to which rational agents, with maximal, rather than minimal, knowledge of their life circumstances, would agree to the out...

Criminal conflict as collective punishment

While political conflicts have been extensively studied by political scientists, criminal conflicts have received much less attention, especially by theorists in the field. Focusing on the latter type of conflict, we address why an individual crime across an ethnic or tribal border often leads to large-scale violence. Building on rational choice theory, we present three hypothetical mechanisms ...

On the Effectiveness of Prison as Punishment

Distributed punishment as a norm-signalling tool

Recent studies show that punishment plays a crucial role in favoring and maintaining social order. However, very little attention has been paid so far to the potential of distributed punishment. In this work we put forward the hypothesis that distributed punishment is more effective than individual punishment, because is more persuasive in conveying messages of peer condemnation and of shared n...

Pigou, Becker and the Regulation of Punishment‐proof Firms

We study the use of fines and inspections to control production activities that create external damages. The model contains a continuum of firms, differing in their compliance costs, so that only high-cost firms evade the regulations. If fines are low, then Pigouvian rules for taxing externalities apply, modified to account for costly inspections. According to Becker’s classic work on crime and...