IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/ecinqu/v36y1998i2p266-71.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Optimal Punishment Schemes with State-Dependent Preferences

Author

Listed:
  • Neilson, William S

Abstract

The optimal trade-off between the certainty and severity of punishment is studied in a setting in which individuals are more sensitive to changes in certainty than severity and have state-dependent preferences--being convicted of a crime reduces utility at every wealth level. In this setting, it is not optimal to set the probability of punishment at one even if it is costless in convict criminals because reducing the certainty of punishment also reduces the probability that offenders' utility functions shift downward. The optimal level of certainty is therefore lower than that implied by prior studies based on state-independent preferences. Copyright 1998 by Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Neilson, William S, 1998. "Optimal Punishment Schemes with State-Dependent Preferences," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 36(2), pages 266-271, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:ecinqu:v:36:y:1998:i:2:p:266-71
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Nuno Garoupa, 1998. "Crime and punishment: Further results," Economics Working Papers 344, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
    2. Langlais, Eric, 2006. "Criminals and risk attitude," MPRA Paper 1149, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 15 Sep 2006.
    3. Éric Langlais, 2010. "Les criminels aiment-ils le risque ?," Revue économique, Presses de Sciences-Po, vol. 61(2), pages 263-280.
    4. Eric Langlais, 2008. "Detection Avoidance and Deterrence: Some Paradoxical Arithmetic," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 10(3), pages 371-382, June.
    5. Eric LANGLAIS, 2009. "Deterrence Of A Criminal Team: How To Rely On Its Members' Short Comings ?," Journal of Applied Economic Sciences, Spiru Haret University, Faculty of Financial Management and Accounting Craiova, vol. 4(1(7)_ Spr).
    6. Nuno Garoupa, 2003. "Behavioral Economic Analysis of Crime: A Critical Review," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 15(1), pages 5-15, January.
    7. Mark White, 2006. "A Kantian critique of neoclassical law and economics," Review of Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 18(2), pages 235-252.
    8. Liqun Liu & Andrew Rettenmaier & Thomas Saving, 2009. "Conditional payments and self-protection," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 38(2), pages 159-172, April.
    9. Liqun Liu, 2008. "Spillover of cause-specific longevity interventions: an independent mortality risk model," The European Journal of Health Economics, Springer;Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsökonomie (DGGÖ), vol. 9(2), pages 193-201, May.
    10. Chiu, W.Henry & Madden, Paul, 2007. "Crime, punishment, and background risks," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 62(4), pages 543-555, April.
    11. Liu, Liqun & Neilson, William S., 2006. "Endogenous private safety investment and the willingness to pay for mortality risk reductions," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 50(8), pages 2063-2074, November.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:ecinqu:v:36:y:1998:i:2:p:266-71. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/weaaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.