A contextual approach to the study of sanction maps an important connection between the behavioral sciences and jurisprudence .I Modem jurisprudence is open to the scientific study of every phase of law in society. The problems may be conceived from the point of view of a contemplative spectator of events or of an imaginative manipulator who thinks in terms of postulated goals.2 Although the pr...

This article uses a two-period version of the standard economic model of deterrence to study whether sanctions should depend on an individual’s record of prior convictions—his offense history. The principal contribution of the article is to demonstrate that it may be optimal to treat repeat offenders disadvantageously because such a policy serves to enhance deterrence: When an individual contem...

The means by which the U.S. justice system attempts to control illegal hacking are practiced under the assumption that hacking is like any other illegal crime. This chapter evaluates this assumption by comparing illegal hacking to shoplifting. Three inhibitors of two illegal behaviors are examined: informal sanction, punishment severity, and punishment certainty. A survey of 136 undergraduate s...

We conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate the impact of institutions and institutional choice on truth-telling and trust in sender-receiver games. We find that in an institution with sanctioning opportunities, receivers sanction predominantly after having trusted lies. Individuals who sanction are responsible for truth-telling beyond standard equilibrium predictions and are more likely ...

All known human societies have maintained social order by enforcing compliance with social norms. The biological mechanisms underlying norm compliance are, however, hardly understood. We show that the right lateral prefrontal cortex (rLPFC) is involved in both voluntary and sanction-induced norm compliance. Both types of compliance could be changed by varying the neural excitability of this bra...

0