IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-04526562.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Optimal Marginal Deterrence and Incentives for Precaution

Author

Listed:
  • Lionel Thomas

    (CRESE - Centre de REcherches sur les Stratégies Economiques (UR 3190) - UFC - Université de Franche-Comté - UBFC - Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté [COMUE])

Abstract

This paper studies marginal deterrence in the presence of a basic and an aggravated harm when the occurrence of the latter may be reduced by criminals exerting costly precaution. We determine the optimal probability of fines when the enforcement authority provides incentives such that, if criminals commit offenses, they exert precaution. We show that marginal deterrence is fully optimal, even for severe basic harms. That is, the fine associated with the basic harm is not equal to the maximal sanction, the criminal's wealth. Moreover, implementing marginal deterrence leads to the use of fines and the probability of being caught and sanctioned in a different way compared to Becker's well-known result.

Suggested Citation

  • Lionel Thomas, 2015. "Optimal Marginal Deterrence and Incentives for Precaution," Post-Print hal-04526562, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04526562
    DOI: 10.1515/rle-2012-0009
    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.

    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:hal:journl:hal-04526562. 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: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    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.