In this article we incorporate notions of the fairness of sanctions into the standard model of public enforcement. When both the probability and magnitude of sanctions may be varied, the usual solution involves a very high sanction and a relatively low probability of enforcement if individuals are risk neutral. When the issue of fairness is added to the analysis, the optimal sanction generally ...

Sanction lists as published by national and supranational organizations contain details on sanctioned entities. Those lists have to be obeyed in order to avoid legal implications. Yet, sanction lists are of very low information quality. Nevertheless, regulatory compliance demands, that organizations check their customer master data against sanction lists. We analyze sanction lists in this contr...

Integrating social learning and deterrence literatures, the present study hypothesizes a circumstance in which aspects of sanction threats mitigate the influence of deviant peers on criminal offending. Multiple regression analyses of the National Youth Survey (Wave VI, 1984) yielded results generally consistent with the hypothesized relationships: 1) Deviant peers predict self-offending after c...

Agents may commit a crime twice. The act is inefficient so that the agents are to be deterred. The agents are wealth constrained so that increasing the fine for the first offense means a reduction in the sanction for the second offense and vice versa. The agents may follow history dependent strategies. The government seeks to minimize the probability of apprehension. The optimal sanction scheme...

We present a refinement of Anderson’s reduction of deontic logic to modal logic with only alethic modalities. The refined proposal contextualizes the Andersonian sanction constant s by replacing it with a unary sanction operator S that is dependent on the concrete normative requirement that is violated. A formula SB is then for instance interpreted as “B causes a sanction” or as “B provides a r...

Social sanctions may be a strong deterrent of crime. This paper presents a formal model that relates crime and social sanction to social interaction density. We empirically test the theoretical predictions using a provincial level panel dataset on different crimes in Italy between 1996 and 2003. We exploit detailed demographic and geo-morphological information to develop exogenous measures of s...

Sanctions are used ubiquitously to enforce obedience to social norms. However, recent field studies and laboratory experiments have demonstrated that cooperation is sometimes reduced when incentives meant to promote prosocial decisions are added to the environment. Although various explanations for this effect have been suggested, the neural foundations of the effect have not been fully explore...

Deterrence studies have shown that perceived sanction risk is related to delinquent behaviour, independent of other variables, and that this relation may be conditioned by individual propensity towards crime. The principal goal of this study is to assess these findings with data from a sample of 843 Dutch adolescents. First, we analysed whether perceived sanction risk (perceived apprehension ri...

Sanctions are used ubiquitously to enforce obedience to social norms. Recent field studies and laboratory experiments have demonstrated, however, that cooperation is sometimes reduced when incentives meant to promote pro-social decisions are added to the environment. Although a variety of explanations have been suggested, the neural foundations of this effect have not been fully explored. Using...