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 shown that when only deterrence matters the op-timal

standard of proof is a preponderance-of-the-evidence standard (given

some other assumptions) while if fairness is an issue the standard will gen-erally

be stricter and involve Bayesian up-dating. When both fairness and

deterrence matter the standard of proof will (generally) lie in between the

two standards. An example illustrates how the model might be applied in

practice to determine the optimal standard of proof for a given crime.

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Paper provided by Copenhagen Business School, Department of Finance in its series Working Papers with number 2000-7.

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Length: 32 pages
Date of creation: 08 Aug 2000
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:hhs:cbsfin:2000_007

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Related research

Keywords: Law;

Find related papers by JEL classification:
A00 - General Economics and Teaching - - General - - - General

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    • Steven Shavell, 2003. "Economic Analysis of Accident Law," NBER Working Papers 9483, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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