An injurer’s activity often exposes multiple potential victims to the risk of harm. We show that under negligence—the tort system’s dominant regime—such victims face a collective-action problem in choosing their activity levels. An increase in one victim’s activity level confers a...

This paper establishes that there may be an inverse relation between the rate of detection and the deterrent effects of stigma. The more people are detected and stigmatized, the less deterrence there may be. This conclusion is based on a search model in which the costs of searching for...

A higher expected sanction lowers the crime rate. This intuitive cornerstone of deterrence theory has garnered extensive theoretical and empirical research. The present study focuses on the opposite effects--the effects of the crime rate on the expected sanction. It turns out that these effects...