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Don't Say You're Sorry Unless You Mean It: Pricing Apologies To Achieve Credibility, Murat C. Mungan
Don't Say You're Sorry Unless You Mean It: Pricing Apologies To Achieve Credibility, Murat C. Mungan
Scholarly Publications
Remorse and apologies by offenders have not been rigorously analyzed in the law and economics literature. This is perhaps because apologies are regarded as ’cheap talk’ and are deemed to be non-informative of an individual’s conscious state. In this paper, I develop a formal framework in which one can analyze remorse and apologies. I argue that legal procedures can be designed to price apologies, such that only truly remorseful individuals apologize. Hence, apologies would not be mere ’cheap talk’ and could send correct signals regarding an offender’s true conscious state, making them credible. This will lead victims, upon receiving apologies, …
Repeat Offenders: If They Learn, We Punish Them More Severely, Murat C. Mungan
Repeat Offenders: If They Learn, We Punish Them More Severely, Murat C. Mungan
Scholarly Publications
Many legal systems are designed to punish repeat offenders more severely than first time offenders. However, existing economic literature generally offers either mixed or qualified results regarding optimal punishment of repeat offenders. This paper analyzes optimal punishment schemes in a two period model, where the social planner announces possibly-different sanctions for offenders based on their detection history. When offenders learn how to evade the detection mechanism employed by the government, escalating punishments can be optimal. The contributions of this paper can be listed as follows: First, it identifies and formalizes a source which may produce a marginal effect in the …