You go First! Coordination Problems and the Standard of Proof in Inquisitorial Prosecution

Robin Christmann and Roland Kirstein

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The prosecution of criminals is costly, and subject to errors. In contrast to adversarial court procedures, the prosecutor is regarded as an impartial investigator and aide to the judge in inquisitorial justice systems. We show in a sequential prosecution game of a Bayesian court that a strategic interaction between these two benevolent enforcement agents exists where each player hopes to freeride on the other one´s investigative effort. This gives rise to inefficient equilibria with excessive operating and error costs. Moreover, we will demonstrate that our results are sensitive to the applied standard of proof and that, more disturbingly, the inefficient outcome becomes more probable when the conviction threshold is raised. Applying the concept of ‘beyond reasonable doubt’, we analyze the impact of the standard of proof and other legal policy instruments on type I and type II errors and operating costs.

Keywords: criminal justice; reasonable doubt; litigation; court errors (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K14 K41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-04-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth, nep-law, nep-mic and nep-ore
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:99686

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