Discounting and Criminals’ Implied Risk Preferences

Mungan Murat C. () and Klick Jonathan ()
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Mungan Murat C.: College of Law, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA Department of Economics, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA
Klick Jonathan: Law School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Review of Law & Economics, 2015, vol. 11, issue 1, 19-23

Abstract: Conventional wisdom holds that potential offenders are more responsive to increases in the certainty than increases in the severity of punishment. In standard law enforcement models, this assumption implies that criminals are risk seeking. We add to the existing literature by showing that offenders who discount future monetary benefits can be more responsive to the certainty rather than the severity of punishment, even when they are risk averse, and even when their disutility from imprisonment rises proportionally (or more than proportionally) with the length of the sentence.

Keywords: certainty of punishment; severity of punishment; deterrence; risk attitudes; discounting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K00 K10 K14 K40 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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DOI: 10.1515/rle-2014-0048

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