In any legal system, one finds numerous rules and practices as well as constitutional provisions which are incompatible with utilitarian considerations. These rules and practices often grant benefits to an individual whose wellbeing is at risk; yet the costs of these benefits to other individuals outweigh the benefits. Thus, for instance, despite the persistent belief of economists that efficie...

recently, a significant change has occurred in the lifting aspect of the security council sanctions, namely, the inclusion of a fixed term in sanctions regimes. we first examine the emergence of the idea of a fixed term for sanctions regimes. with the disappearance of the situation justifying the imposition of sanctions, there is no reason to maintain them. yet, each permanent member may oppose...

In this paper we investigate two important and related aspects of the formalization of open interaction systems: how to specify norms, and how to enforce them by means of sanctions. The problem of specifying the sanctions associated to the violation of norms is crucial in an open system because, given that the compliance of autonomous agents to obligations and prohibitions cannot be taken for g...

The paper provides an economic rationale for punishing repeat offenders with increasing sanctions. We analyse the optimal intertemporal punishment scheme within an infinite game framework. The legal authority is assumed to minimize the social cost of punishment under the constraint of keeping delinquency at a maximal tolerable level. This level is exogenously determined. JEL classification: K14

Benefit sanctions imposed on non-compliant welfare recipients are a new element in the German welfare system. In practice, the sanction policy and the application of sanctions vary considerably across the 439 welfare agencies. Based on combined administrative and survey data, these differences are used as instrumental variables to estimate the effect of sanctions on the drop-out from welfare an...

Many states, or rather their leaders and officials, routinely violate the fundamental human rights of both their compatriots or outsiders. Faced with this depressing catalogue of abuses, the international community’s response of choice consists in imposing economic sanctions on wrongdoers. The relatively scant philosophical literature on the topic tackles primary sanctions where the sanctioning...