Prosecutor and lawyers in plea bargaining with complete information

Philippe Delacote and Lydie Ancelot ()
Additional contact information
Lydie Ancelot: Beta, BETA-CNRS, Université de Nancy

Economics Bulletin, 2009, vol. 29, issue 3, 1925-1932

Abstract: In criminal law, when a conflict is solved by plea bargaining, the negotiation is mainly made between the prosecutor and the lawyer. Adopting a complete information framework about his type (selfish or altruistic), this paper compares two lawyer payment systems: flat fees and hourly-wage fees. We identify the system of fees in which the sentence is the lowest. We first show that under flat fees the prosecutor provides less effort when he faces an altruistic lawyer. Second, we show that under some conditions an altruistic lawyer may accept a higher sentence than a selfish lawyer.

Keywords: plea bargaining; lawyer's selfishness; system of fees (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K1 K4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-08-13
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.accessecon.com/Pubs/EB/2009/Volume29/EB-09-V29-I3-P40.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Prosecutor and lawyers in plea bargaining with complete information (2009)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ebl:ecbull:eb-09-00152

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economics Bulletin from AccessEcon
Bibliographic data for series maintained by John P. Conley ().