The conventional justification for a statute of limitations on tort suits (or any other legal claim) is that evidence deteriorates over time, thereby increasing the likelihood of legal error. The optimal statute balances this cost of a longer statute length against the dilution in deterrence that results from a shorter length. In this paper I develop a formal model to show that a finite statute...

We investigate the evolution and survival of decision making strategies for the Deterrence Game in a population of interacting agents. The Deterrence Game is a sequential, two player game that is used to study how player preference orderings affect the outcome in situations of conflict. Although there are twenty-four possible player preference orderings, only five are given serious theoretical ...

This paper addresses the issue of the optimal standard of proof in criminal law. It is assumed that people in society care about both fairness and deterrence. It is important to punish those who are guilty and only those. However, error is unavoidable and hence a trade-o¤ emerges between the three aims of punishing the guilty, not punishing the innocent and deterring potential criminals. It is ...

The Deterrent Effects of Prison: Evidence from a Natural Experiment* In this paper we test for the theory of deterrence. We exploit the natural experiment provided by the Collective Clemency Bill passed by the Italian Parliament in July 2006. As a consequence of the provisions of the bill, expected punishment to former inmates recommitting a crime can be considered as good as randomly assigned....

No country so empowers its citizens to redress the social harms committed by others as does the United States. Compensating the injured and deterring future violations are frequently seen as complementary objectives of private suits. Our legal system further affirms its commitment to compensation and deterrence through modern joinder rules and class action procedures, not to mention contingency...

We analyze the entry of a new product into a vertically differentiated market in which an entrant and an incumbent compete in prices. Here the entry-deterrence strategies of the incumbent firm rely on “limit qualities.” With a sequential choice of quality, a quality-dependent marginal production cost, and a fixed entry cost, we relate the entry-quality decision and the entry-deterrence strategi...

Investigations on the development of a biocontrol agent against the alarming stored food pest Corcyra cephalonica has witnessed noteworthy growth in current years from mainly physiological studies, to tackling fundamental queries concerning the underlying mode of action. Chitinase from Trichoderma viride, which has inauspicious effects on feeding behavior, development and biochemical parameters...

One popular justification for punishment is the just deserts rationale: A person deserves punishment proportionate to the moral wrong committed. A competing justification is the deterrence rationale: Punishing an offender reduces the frequency and likelihood of future offenses. The authors examined the motivation underlying laypeople's use of punishment for prototypical wrongs. Study 1 (N = 336...

In this paper, we summarize the findings of a series of our papers on the relationship between financial contracting and the game of entry−deterrence in a dynamic context.The incumbent has private information about its cost and enters into an agency relationship with a lender in each of the two periods. We examine the effect of this agency relationship on the probability of entry and limit pric...

The effectiveness of capital punishment in deterring homicides has remained unclear despite the fact that the Supreme Court’s moratorium on capital punishment and the subsequent adoption of capital punishment by a subset of states, combined with very different rates of execution across polities, would appear to be an ideal environment for revealing deterrence effects using panel data methods. O...