Criminal law enforcement depends on the actions of public agents such as police officers, but there is no standard economic model of police as public agents. We seek to remedy this deficiency by offering an agency model of police behavior. We begin by explaining why the standard contracting...

Criminal law enforcement depends on the actions of public agents such as police officers, but the resulting agency problems have been neglected in the law and economics literature (especially outside the specific context of corruption). We develop an agency model of police behavior that...

Criminal law enforcement depends on the actions of public agents such as police officers, but the resulting agency problems have been neglected in the law and economics literature (especially outside the specific context of corruption). We develop an agency model of police behavior that...

A behavioral economics literature identifies how behaviorally-derived assumptions affect the economic analysis of criminal law and public law enforcement. We review and extend that literature. Specifically, we consider the effect of cognitive biases, prospect theory, hedonic adaptation,...

We argue that legislation can generate compliance expressively, independently of deterrence. The Condorcet Jury Theorem implies that, in certain circumstances, the legislative process aggregates the private information of legislators to reach a decision superior to that of any individual...

Welfarist law and economics ignores the distributive consequences of legal rules to focus solely on efficiency, even though distribution unambiguously affects welfare, the normative maximand. The now-conventional justification for disregarding distribution is the claim of tax superiority: that...

This introduction, prepared for an edited volume, offers some observations on the importance — indeed, inescapability — of fairness concerns in law and economics. The relationship between fairness and the economic concept of efficiency is usually cast as an adversarial one. Rational choice...

This entry reviews experimental economics research relevant to law and economics. The introduction includes a brief discussion of experimental methodology and a survey of the categories of experiments relevant to law and economics, with citations to other reviews and compilations. The entry then...

Everyone realizes the importance of social norms as guides to behavior and substitutes for law, but coming up with a paradigm for analyzing norms has been surprisingly difficult, as has systematic empirical study. In this chapter we survey the topic.