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Fairness And The Willingness To Accept Plea Bargain Offers, Oren Gazal-Ayal, Avishalom Tor, Stephen M. Garcia
Fairness And The Willingness To Accept Plea Bargain Offers, Oren Gazal-Ayal, Avishalom Tor, Stephen M. Garcia
Oren Gazal-Ayal
In contrast with the typical assumption in plea bargaining law and economics, we show defendants may reject plea offers based on fairness considerations. Specifically, offers where the sanction clearly appears excessive for the crime ("substantively unfair") and offers that appear inferior to those received by others in similar cases ("comparatively unfair") diminish defendants' wiliingness to accept plea offers (WTAP). Part 1 analyzes real-world data in Study 1 and reviews early experiments, all of which sugget substantive fairness impacts WTAP but do not control for important confounds. Part 2 therefore presents Studies 2-4 that confirm the independent impact of substantive fairness. …