Probability Of Punishment Research Articles

Mathematical Neurolaw of Crime and Punishment: The <i>q</i>-Exponential Punishment Function

Whether people tend to punish criminals in a socially-optimal manner (i.e., hyperbolic punishment) or not is unknown. By adopting mathematical models of probabilistic punishment behavior (i.e., exponential, hyperbolic, and q-exponential probability discounting model based on Tsallis thermodynamics and neuroeconomics, Takahashi, 2007, Physica A; Takahashi et al., 2012, Applied Mathematics), we examined 1) fitness of the models to behavioral data of uncertain punishment, and 2) deviation from the socially optimal hyperbolic punishment function. Our results demonstrated that, the q-exponential punishment function best fits the behavioral data, and people overweigh the severity of punishment at small punishing probabilities and underweigh the severity of punishment at large punishing probabilities. In other words, people tend to punish crimes too severely and mildly with high and low arrest rate (e.g., homicide vs. excess of speed limit), respectively. Implications for neuroeconomics and neurolaw of crime and punishment (Takahashi, 2012, NeuroEndocrinology Letters) are discussed.

Crime, Deterrence, and Democracy

Abstract The article provides new evidence on the effects of a major shock to deterrence on crime. The collapse of communism in the Czech Republic in 1989 was followed by sharp reductions in the probability and severity of punishment and by sharp increases in crime rates. I investigate whether deterrence was a significant contributor to the post-1989 growth in crime on a panel dataset of Czech regions. The results show strong deterrence effects for robbery, theft and intentional injury, but not for murder and rape. About 25% of the increase in robberies and 50% of the growth in thefts is accounted for by weaker deterrence.

Certainty of Punishment versus Severity of Punishment: An Experimental Investigation

Compliance with laws and regulations depends on the expected penalty facing violators. The expected penalty depends on both the probability of punishment and the severity of the punishment if caught. A key question in the economics of crime literature is whether increasing the probability of punishment is a more effective deterrent than increasing the severity of punishment. This article uses laboratory experiments to investigate this issue and finds that increasing the severity of punishment is a more effective deterrent than an equivalent increase in the probability of punishment. This result contrasts with the findings of the empirical crime literature.

Regulating Unverifiable Quality by Fixed-Price Contracts

Abstract We apply the idea of relational contracting to a simple problem of regulating a single-product monopoly with unverifiable (then ex ante not contractible) quality. We model the interaction between the regulator and the firm as an infinitely repeated game; we observe that there exist self-enforcing contracts in which the regulator, using her discretionary power on the price (the contractible variable) can induce the firm to produce the required quality level by leaving it a positive rent. When players use grim trigger strategies, the optimal self-enforcing contract implies a distortion from the second best which is greater the more impatient is the firm and the larger is the effect of the price on the deviation profits. Whenever the equilibrium profits of the static game are strictly positive, even if the firm were infinitely patient, the optimal contract would not reach the second-best: it would ensure a quality-adjusted Ramsey condition and, at the same time, leave positive profits to the firm. We extend the model in a few ways: we find that when players use stick-and-carrot strategies, with an infinitely patient firm the second-best outcome is reached even if this implies to punish the deviating firm with negative profits. When instead the regulator is unable to perfectly monitor the firm's quality choice, the price/quality pair giving the highest payoff to the regulator does not directly depend on the firm's discount factor, which instead affects the probability of punishment. Our results suggest that, in fixed price regulatory contracts, the regulatory lag should be shorter the more relevant is the issue of unverifiability, in order to reduce the reward for opportunistic behavior by the firm.

Deterrence: Increased enforcement versus harsher penalties

Empirical studies have found that increasing the probability of punishment has a greater effect on crime than the severity of punishment. This note explains this as the result of criminals having imperfect information on their criminal ability. As they commit crimes, they update their estimates of their ability, based on their success rate. Increased penalties deter crime in the period they are applied but offer criminals no information on their criminal ability. Crime is also deterred during a period of increased enforcement. In addition, increased enforcement leads some criminals to decrease their estimates of their ability, leading to reduced recidivism.

Pitfalls of CITES Implementation in Nepal: A Policy Gap Analysis

Implementation of policy involves multiple agencies operating at multiple levels in facilitating processes and actions to accomplish desired results. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) was developed and implemented to regulate and control international wildlife trade, but violations of the agreement are widespread and growing worldwide, including in Nepal. This study attempts to understand how domestic CITES policies are translated into action and what effect actions and processes have on compliance. In doing so, this study provides insights into the implementation and enforcement pitfalls of national legislation that explain CITES violations in Nepal. Primarily, we used 26 key informants interviews to learn opinions of experts, and the grounded theory approach for further qualitative data analysis. In addition, we used Najman's (1995) policy implementation analysis framework to explain gaps. Many interrelated variables in the content of the policy, commitment and capacity of the agencies, the roles of clients and coalitions and contextual issues were observed. Variables that emerged suggest pitfalls in the regulatory policy represented by low probability of detection, arrest and punishment. Moreover, redistributive policies in buffer zones of protected areas are needed into perpetuity to benefit locals. Also, conservation organizations' support for building public and political salience is imperative.

Crime and punishment: Does it pay to punish?

Crime is the result of a rational distinctive balance between the benefits and costs of an illegal act. This idea was proposed by Becker more than forty years ago (Becker (1968) [1]). In this paper, we simulate a simple artificial society, in which agents earn fixed wages and can augment (or lose) wealth as a result of a successful (or not) act of crime. The probability of apprehension depends on the gravity of the crime, and the punishment takes the form of imprisonment and fines. We study the costs of the law enforcement system required for keeping crime within acceptable limits, and compare it with the harm produced by crime. A sharp phase transition is observed as a function of the probability of punishment, and this transition exhibits a clear hysteresis effect, suggesting that the cost of reversing a deteriorated situation might be much higher than that of maintaining a relatively low level of delinquency. Besides, we analyze economic consequences that arise from crimes under different scenarios of criminal activity and probabilities of apprehension.

Forfeiture of Illegal Gains and Implied Risk Preferences

In the law enforcement literature there is a presumption – supported by some experimental and econometric evidence – that criminals are more responsive to increases in the certainty than the severity of punishment. Under a general set of assumptions, this implies that criminals are risk seeking. We show that this implication is no longer valid when forfeiture of illegal gains and the possibility of unsuccessful attempts are considered. Therefore, when drawing inferences concerning offenders’ risk attitudes based on their responses to various punishment schemes, special attention must be paid to whether and to what extent offenders’ illegal gains can be forfeited and whether increases in the probability of punishment affect the probability of attempts being successful. We discuss policy implications related to our observations.

The Hyperbolic Punishment Function

All models in Law and Economics use punishment functions (hereafter, PF) that incorporate a trade-off between probability of detection, p, and punishment, F. Suppose society wishes to minimize the total costs of enforcement and damages from crime, T( p,F). For a given p, an optimal punishment function (OPF) determines an F that minimizes T( p,F). A popular and tractable PF is the hyperbolic punishment function (HPF). We show that the HPF is an OPF for a large class of total cost functions. Furthermore, the HPF is an upper (lower ) bound for an even larger class of punishment functions. If the HPF cannot (can) deter crime, then none (all ) of the PF’s for which the HPF is an upper (lower ) bound can deter crime. Thus, if one can demonstrate that a particular policy is ineffective (effective) under the HPF, there is no need to even compute the OPF. Our results should underpin an even greater use of the HPF. We give illustrations from mainstream and behavioral economics.

Rational Ignorance in Education: A Field Experiment in Student Plagiarism

Despite the concern that student plagiarism has become increasingly common, there is relatively little objective data on the prevalence or determinants of this illicit behavior. This study presents the results of a natural field experiment designed to address these questions. Over 1,200 papers were collected from the students in undergraduate courses at a selective post-secondary institution. Students in half of the participating courses were randomly assigned to a requirement that they complete an anti-plagiarism tutorial before submitting their papers. We found that assignment to the treatment group substantially reduced the likelihood of plagiarism, particularly among student with lower SAT scores who had the highest rates of plagiarism. A follow-up survey of participating students suggests that the intervention reduced plagiarism by increasing student knowledge rather than by increasing the perceived probabilities of detection and punishment. These results are consistent with a model of student behavior in which the decision to plagiarize reflects both a poor understanding of academic integrity and the perception that the probabilities of detection and severe punishment are low.

Probability of Corporal Punishment: Lack of Resources and Vulnerable Students

ABSTRACT The author examined corporal punishment practices in the United States based on data from 362 public school principals where corporal punishment is available. Results from multiple regression analyses show that schools with multiple student violence prevention programs and teacher training programs had fewer possibilities of use corporal punishment, whereas schools that served a greater percentage of ethnic minority students and special education students had a 2.1 times greater and a 1.8 times greater likelihood of use corporal punishment, after controlling for students’ problem behavior and school characteristics. Policy implications for an equal implementation of corporal punishment practice were offered.

Electrophysiological correlates of decision‐making in high‐risk versus low‐risk conditions of a gambling game

The majority of studies investigating risky decision making focus on the high-conflict condition, and very few consider the low-conflict condition in which there is either a very high or a very low probability of risk. Even though the high-risk condition and low-risk condition are both considered low-conflict decision scenarios and both behavioral outcomes are highly predictable, these conditions still differ in terms of the probabilities of reward and punishment. In the following study, we investigated both behavioral and electrophysiological correlates associated with high- and low-risk conditions within the low-conflict scenario, as well as high-conflict condition, in a modified gambling game. The behavioral results showed that, within the low-conflict scenario, the participants took more time to make the decision in the high-risk condition compared to the low-risk condition. The event-related potentials (ERP) data showed that, during the decision making, the high-risk condition evoked a more negative ERP deflection than did the low-risk condition in the time window of 300-500 ms (N400), which had a frontocentral focus of scalp distribution. The results suggested that the high-risk condition was associated with a higher conflict between the participants' "motivationally based" tendency to want to receive cards and the task instructions, which stated that the face value of the first two cards will strongly predict a low probability of success. It was further speculated that the N400 in the present study might be associated with anticipation of negative rewards, which was functionally equivalent to the FRN (feedback-related negativity) to negative outcomes.

The Deterrent Effect of Antitrust Sanctions: Evidence from Switzerland

With the effectiveness of the revision of the Swiss Cartel Act on April 1, 2004, the Competition Commission (the COMCO) gained considerable new powers, especially the power to sanction anticompetitive behavior by imposing substantial fines. Additionally, the revision provided the COMCO with enhanced means of gathering evidence of competition law infringements by conducting dawn raids, thereby increasing the probability of detection and punishment for competition law infringements. Both steps together aimed at strengthening the deterrent effect of antitrust sanctions. Against this background, the article investigates to what extent the revision has reached its goal by conducting a survey among Swiss antitrust lawyers and firms. The results show that the revision certainly has strengthened the deterrent effect of antitrust sanctions in Switzerland. However, in some areas, greater specificity of the legal provisions is advisable in order to increase legal certainty and to avoid negative effects on social welfare by deterring procompetitive behavior.

An Experimental Test of the Deterrence Hypothesis

Crime has to be punished, but does punishment reduce crime? We conduct a neutrally framed laboratory experiment to test the deterrence hypothesis, namely that crime is weakly decreasing in deterrent incentives, i.e. severity and probability of punishment. In our experiment, subjects can steal from another participant's payoff. Deterrent incentives vary across and within sessions. The across subject analysis clearly rejects the deterrence hypothesis: except for very high levels of incentives, subjects steal more the stronger the incentives. We observe two types of subjects: selfish subjects who act according to the deterrence hypothesis and fair-minded subjects for whom deterrent incentives backfire.

Modelling the individual and collective dynamics of the propensity to offend

We introduce a general framework for modelling the dynamics of the propensity to offend in a population of (possibly interacting) agents. We consider that each agent has an ‘honesty index’ which parameterizes his probability of abiding by the law. This probability also depends on a composite parameter associated to the attractiveness of the crime outcome and of the crime setting (the context which makes a crime more or less likely to occur, such as the presence or not of a guardian). Within this framework we explore some consequences of the working hypothesis that punishment has a deterrent effect, assuming that, after a criminal act, an agent's honesty index may increase if he is caught and decrease otherwise. We provide both analytical and numerical results. We show that in the space of parameters characterizing the probability of punishment, there are two ‘phases’: one corresponding to a population with a low crime rate and the other to a population with a large crime rate. We speculate on the possible existence of a self-organized state in which, due to the society reaction against crime activities, the population dynamics would be stabilized on the critical line, leading to a wide distribution of propensities to offend in the population. In view of empirical works on the causes of the recent evolution of crime rates in developed countries, we discuss how changes of socio-economic conditions may affect the model parameters, and hence the crime rate in the population. We suggest possible extensions of the model that will allow us to take into account more realistic features.

Characterization of Children’s Affective Decision Making: Sensitivity to the Frequency of Punishment and Reward

Affective decision making is an individual ability to make choice under risk and uncertainty. The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) developed by Bechara has been widely used to assess decision behavior under uncertainty. The original IGT was designed to examine the decision making that is profitable in the future. In IGT participants have to develop a long-term profitable monetary scenario in a situation of uncertainty and a conflict between the chance of encountering an immediate large reward (US$100) in two long-term loosing decks (A and B; US$250 per10 cards) and the chance of encountering an immediate small reward (US$50) in two long-term winning decks (C and D; US$+250 per 10 cards). According to the research, it is found that normal adults choose more from the good decks while individuals with pre-frontal ventromedial cortex (VM-PFC) never learned to choose more from the good decks. Bechara consider that patients with VM-PFC opting for choices that yield high immediate gains in spite of higher future losses. While there is a large amount of research on the IGT in the adult population, there is less work done on children. In order to examine whether young children would show a similar preference for immediate prospects, the modification IGT adopted considering children unique features. Basically, development of affective decision making was studied in 120 children at the age of 3 and 5 using modified IGT. Results shows young children are inclined to make advantageous choices, in particular, when the probability of punishment is higher. Children act sensitively towards the frequency of rewards and punishments. Compared with the age of 3 and 4, the study also implies that the age of 4 and 5 ones could make more advantageous choice by increasing the frequency of reward in advantage cards. In conclusion, both standards and reversed tasks show children’s decision making deficits might be associated with sensitivity to frequency of punishment. However, this is not noticeable among younger aged group. The abilities of affective decision making be developed extremely fast between 3 and 4 years old.

Blind justice: An experimental analysis of random punishment in team production

We study the effect of blind punishment in a team production experiment, in which subjects choose non-observable effort levels. In this setting, a random exclusion mechanism is introduced, linked to the normalized group performance ( R, from 0 to 1). Every round, each subject is non-excluded from the collective profit with probability R (and with probability 1 − R gets no benefit from the group account). Punishment does not depend on the individual behavior, but the probability of being punished reflects collective performance. As the exclusion probability is computed at the group level, no individual information is needed to implement exclusion. However, the probabilistic punishment risks to be perceived by subjects as procedurally unfair, as all subjects are treated in an identical, non-equitable manner (justice is blind). Our results suggest that random exclusion promotes a significant increase in cooperation. The effect seems to be associated with hot behavioral responses to punishment. However, convergence to full contribution is not observed.

Regulatory compliance in Lake Victoria fisheries

ABSTRACTThis paper analyzes the causes for regulatory compliance, using traditional deterrence variables and potential moral and social variables. We use self-reported data from 459 Tanzanian artisanal fishers in Lake Victoria. The results indicate that the decision to be either a non-violator or a violator, as well as the violation rate – if the latter – are influenced by changes in deterrence variables like the probability of detection and punishment and also by legitimacy and social variables. We also identify a small group of fishers who react neither to normative aspects nor to traditional deterrence variables but persistently violate the regulation.

The dynamics of deterrence

Because punishment is scarce, costly, and painful, optimal enforcement strategies will minimize the amount of actual punishment required to effectuate deterrence. If potential offenders are sufficiently deterrable, increasing the conditional probability of punishment (given violation) can reduce the amount of punishment actually inflicted, by "tipping" a situation from its high-violation equilibrium to its low-violation equilibrium. Compared to random or "equal opportunity" enforcement, dynamically concentrated sanctions can reduce the punishment level necessary to tip the system, especially if preceded by warnings. Game theory and some simple and robust Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate these results, which, in addition to their potential for reducing crime and incarceration, may have implications for both management and regulation.

Deterrence and avoidance

This paper explores the effects of public enforcement, in general, and punishment, in particular, on crime levels if offenders can engage in avoidance activities. Avoidance reduces the probability or magnitude of punishment. In general, offenders can reduce their expected punishment either by substituting legal activities for criminal activities (the deterrence effect) or by increasing avoidance activities. This paper shows that increasing the direct costs of crime – by either increasing punishment or enforcement efforts – does not necessarily deter criminal activity and may actually trigger increased crime if avoidance is possible. Furthermore, this paper shows that increasing the opportunity costs of crime (e.g. by subsidizing legal alternatives or through educational and vocational programs) reduces both crime and avoidance and thus, in this respect, is advantageous. The conditions for these outcomes are identified, the economic mechanisms are explained, and an underlying intuitive approach for these results is proposed.