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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Review Of Game Theory And The Social Contract: Volume 1, Playing Fair By Ken Binmore, Eric Bennett Rasmusen
Review Of Game Theory And The Social Contract: Volume 1, Playing Fair By Ken Binmore, Eric Bennett Rasmusen
Eric Bennett Rasmusen
A review of Binmore's book using game theory in setting up foundations for constitutional theory.
Predictable And Unpredictable Error In Tort Awards: The Effect Of Plaintiff Self Selection And Signalling, Eric Bennett Rasmusen
Predictable And Unpredictable Error In Tort Awards: The Effect Of Plaintiff Self Selection And Signalling, Eric Bennett Rasmusen
Eric Bennett Rasmusen
If a tort plaintiff can predict that the court will overestimate damages he is more likely to bring a case, but if the court is aware of this, it may wish to adjust its awards accordingly. In general, court error implies that the court should adjust for regression to the mean, moderating extreme awards whether they be high or low. Predictable error, however, tends to make a downwards adjustment optimal and unpredictable error an upwards adjustment, because of plaintiff selection and signalling.
How Optimal Penalties Change With The Amount Of Harm, Eric Bennett Rasmusen
How Optimal Penalties Change With The Amount Of Harm, Eric Bennett Rasmusen
Eric Bennett Rasmusen
Intuition tells us that the optimal penalty and court care should rise smoothly with the harm to the victim. A formal model is constructed to see if this intuition can be justified, but it appears not to be generally true: sometimes the optimal penalty and court care increase discontinuously with harm, even under reasonable assumptions on the relationship between the penalty and the amount of crime. One reason why criminal penalties are not maximal is that even if they are fines, without real costs, the efficient level of court care will still allow them to sometimes be mistakenly inflicted on …