Prosecutorial Resources, Plea Bargaining, and the Decision to Go to Trial

This article examines the strategic interaction between a defendantand a prosecutor during the plea bargaining process. A four-stagegame of incomplete information is developed where the defendant'sguilt or innocence is private information but the amount ofresources available to the prosecutor is common knowledge. Thebasic result of the article is that equilibrium is semiseparating;the plea offer is accepted by a proportion of the guilty defendantsand is rejected by all of the innocent defendants and the remainingguilty defendants. In this model an increase in the resourcesavailable to the prosecutor increases the proportion of guiltydefendants who accept plea offers. Although the prosecutor isunable to generate complete separation of the guilty and innocentdefendants through the plea bargaining process, prosecutorialresources are beneficial from a societal standpoint.     

Secrecy and fairness in plea bargaining with multiple defendants

I consider a model of plea bargaining with multiple codefendants. I mainly compare the equilibrium outcomes under joint negotiations whereby both defendants can observe both plea offers and under separate (secret) negotiations whereby they can observe only their own respective offer. Contrary to the widespread perceptions, the prosecutor is made worse off under secret negotiations or at best as well off as under joint negotiations. I also discuss the implication of equilibrium offers on fairness.      

Negotiated Enforcement and Credible Deterrence

This paper develops a model of law enforcement in which indicted offenders and the prosecutor can negotiate the penalty prior to the completion of the investigation. The analysis focuses on the credibility of the conviction threat: the prosecutor cannot commit to any predetermined level of investigative effort should the negotiation fail. The settlement stage introduces several new features of the optimal enforcement policy, including the possibility that maximal sanctions may not be optimal. We show that the screening process associated with the negotiation stage reduces the incentives for the prosecutor to undertake thorough investigations and increases the rate of noncompliance.     

Can Pre-recorded Evidence Raise Conviction Rates in Cases of Domestic Violence?

This paper explores the association between pre-recorded evidence and court outcomes in cases of domestic violence. Net of controls and time fixed effects, we find that cases with pre-recorded evidence are 3.4 percentage points more likely to result in a conviction. This increase occurs through three channels: a 5.6 percentage point increase in the probability of a conviction among (the one in four) cases that proceed to a defended hearing; a 2.4 percentage point increase in the probability of a guilty plea; and, a 2.4 percentage point decrease in the probability that the prosecution withdraws their case.     

Prosecutorial Retention: Signaling by Trial

We examine how retention motives affect prosecutor behavior under different evaluation criteria. In particular, we analyze how prosecutors of differing capabilities respond in choosing which cases to take to trial and which to plea bargain. We show how different criteria distort the mix of cases chosen for trial and that the direction of the distortion depends crucially on the evaluation tool used. Optimal evaluation metrics are derived that combine multiple signals of performance and are shown to achieve the first‐best outcome.     

控辩平等视角下检察官刑事庭审角色定位

控辩平等是整个刑事诉讼的价值追求,它是构建科学诉讼结构、体现司法公正及保护人权的需要,这已在我国法学界和实务界达到共识,并在现行刑事诉讼法中得到一定程度的体现,但在某些权力的设置上,特别是无法正确界定检察官庭审角色,影响到控辩平等原则的有效贯彻,亟需在立法中得以完善,在司法实践中加以落实。文章以此为切入点,从当事人和法律监督者两个角度,提出对检察官在刑事庭审中科学的权力配置设想,保障控辩平等的实现。     

The distortion of criminal evidence

Should witnesses truthfully reveal all information or present the evidence in such a way as to support one side of the dispute? The ability of a witness to distort evidence at some cost in support of the prosecution in a criminal case is considered. It is shown that when distorting the evidence is more difficult, the number of convictions and the accuracy of the decisions improve. When distorting evidence is less costly, the jury must set high standards for conviction, which leads to fewer convictions.     

论刑事审后程序

刑事审后程序是指除审判监督程序外刑事判决生效后一系列程序的总称,包括刑事执行程序、被害人的权利保障程序以及刑罚被执行完毕人员的前科消灭程序等内容。刑事诉讼法学界除了对作为刑事审后程序重要内容的刑事执行程序研究较为充分外,还没有人对刑事审后程序作过系统的专门研究。对刑事审后程序进行系统的理论研究,特别是建立和完善被害人损害赔偿制度和被害人国家补偿制度,建立刑罚被执行完毕人员前科消灭的法律制度,不仅有助于完善我国刑事诉讼法,也有助于社会主义和谐社会的构建。     

The Effects of a Right to Silence

Contrary to conventional wisdom, a right to silence can reduce wrongful convictions of innocent suspects who tell police the truth, and may reduce the overall conviction rate without affecting the confession rate. We establish these conclusions by modelling interrogation as a game in which suspects are privately informed of their type, but do not know the content of witness reports. Our model has testable implications which distinguish it from competing models. The best data rejects competing models, but does not reject our model.     

Runaway judges? Selection effects and the jury

Reports about runaway jury awards have become so common thatit is widely accepted that the U.S. jury system needs to be'fixed'. Proposals to limit the right to a jury trial and increasejudicial discretion over awards implicitly assume that judgesdecide cases differently than juries. We show that there arelarge differences in mean awards and win rates across juriesand judges. But if the types of cases coming before juries aredifferent from those coming before judges, mean award and winrates may differ even if judges and juries would make the samedecisions when faced with the same cases. We find that mostof the difference in judge and jury mean awards can be explainedby differences in the sample of cases coming before judges andjuries. On some dimensions, however, there remain robust andsuggestive differences between judges and juries.     

The trade-offs from pattern bargaining with uncertain production costs

Pattern bargaining is a negotiating strategy that is often employed by industry-wide unions in oligopolistic industries to set wages. The conventional wisdom is that pattern bargaining “takes labor out of competition” and therefore softens bargaining between the union and firms, resulting in higher industry wide wages. However, this does not explain why firms agree to pattern bargaining. We introduce a model in which the agents face uncertainty about the relative product-market positions of the firms and compare the trade-offs involved in adopting different bargaining mechanisms. We show that with sufficient heterogeneity in non-labor costs, there are situations in which both the union and the firms prefer pattern bargaining. We also show that in such situations, the adoption of pattern bargaining harms consumers. This provides an explanation as to how pattern bargaining can arise in equilibrium and why there is often strong political opposition to it.     

The empirical estimation of the cost-minimizing jury size and voting rule in civil trials

Since the early 1970s, the literature examining the court system has placed much emphasis on the importance of the jury size and voting rule when analyzing the jury decision-making process. In addition, researchers have also used deductive reasoning to theoretically determine the cost-minimizing jury size and voting rule with regards to Type I and Type II errors. In this paper, we take this analysis one step further by empirically estimating the cost-minimizing jury size and voting rule in civil jury trials.     

论法院的刑事诉讼行为

以往刑诉法学界仅停留于对刑事诉讼行为一般理论的探讨，而缺乏对具体刑事诉讼行为的深入研究。作为刑事诉讼行为重要种类的法院刑事诉讼行为是指法院在刑事诉讼中实施的、构成刑事诉讼程序内容的、可以产生诉讼法上肯定或否定效果的诉讼行为的总称。它在整个刑事诉讼活动中占据主导地位。可分为审理行为、认证行为、裁判行为、附带行为和执行行为。对其分类、瑕疵及立法完善等问题进行研究，有利于丰富和深化刑事诉讼行为理论的研究。     

Multilateral Bargaining Problems

In many situations in economics and political science there are gains from forming coalitions but conflict over which coalition to form and how to distribute the gains. This paper presents an approach to suchmultilateral bargaining problems. Asolutionto a multilateral bargaining problem specifies an agreement for each coalition that is consistent with the bargaining process in every coalition. We establish the existence of such solutions, show that they are determined by reservation prices, and characterize these reservation prices as the payoffs ofsubgame perfect equilibrium outcomesof a non-cooperative bargaining model.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: C71, C72, C78.     

SOCIALLY OPTIMAL CRIMINAL COURT WAITING TIMES: A PARTIAL INVESTIGATION

Criminal courts provide a forum for conducting prosecutions with a guilty plea or a trial. Since queues are used as the basis for rationing scarce court facilities delays are inevitable, however courts are invariably criticised as being inefficient as a consequence. This focus on court delay defined as the time elapsing between the listing of the case in the court list and its final disposition is misleading. Rather, attention should be drawn to the considerably longer period between the initiation of proceedings and the conclusion of the case. In the case of defendants not granted bail, this pre-trial delay confers both costs and benefits on society and this observation can be used to ascertain socially optimal pre-trial waits.     

Wage Bargaining Versus Efficiency Wages: A Synthesis

We construct a model integrating the efficiency wage model of Shapiro–Stiglitz (1984) (SS), with an individual wage bargaining model in the Diamond–Mortensen–Pissarides (DMP) tradition where firms and workers form pairwise matches. We show that when workers may threaten to shirk on the job and there is individual wage bargaining, the wage is always higher and employment lower than in either the SS model, or the (appropriately modified) DMP model. When firms determine workers' efforts unilaterally, efforts are set inefficiently low in the SS model. In the bargaining model, effort is higher, and is first best when the worker non–shirking constraint does not bind. The overall equilibrium allocation may then be more or less efficient than in the SS model, but is always less efficient than in a pure bargaining model with no moral hazard.     

The Scope of Anonymous Voluntary Bargaining Under Asymmetric Information

We present a model of anonymous collective bargaining where individuals'preferences and information may be significantly interdependent. We showthat the bargaining outcome becomes independent of individuals'preferences and information as the bargaining group increases in size. As acorollary, we show that anonymous voluntary bargaining completely fails inlarge groups. Either the difference between the bargaining outcome and thestatus quo vanishes as the size of the group becomes larger, or, thebargaining becomes coercive and results in a violation of at least someindividuals' rights. The result provides a rationale for the inherentdifficulty of reform in the presence of asymmetric information.
"There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful ofsuccess, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order ofthings."
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1532)     

Bargaining, search, and outside options

This paper studies a two-sided incomplete information bargaining model between a seller and a buyer. The buyer has an outside option, which is modeled as a sequential search process during which he can choose to return to bargaining at any time. Two cases are considered: In Regime I, both agents have symmetric information about the search parameters. We find that, in contrast to bargaining with complete information, the option to return to bargaining is not redundant in equilibrium. However, the no-delay result still holds. In Regime II, where agents have asymmetric information about the outside option, delay is possible. The solution characterizes the parameters for renegotiation and those for search with no return to the bargaining table.     

The median juror and the trial of Socrates

A model of the mechanism used by the Classical Athenians to prosecute Socrates is presented. Two important features of such trials are, first, both the prosecutor and the defendant propose sanctions and, second, a jury takes a simple majority vote over the two proposals. The Classical Athenians created a mechanism to achieve a median-juror result. This sanction is a Condorcet Winner among all possible sanctions, responds to both the harm of the act and the uncertainty of guilt, and, under reasonable conditions, improves deterrence resulting in fewer crimes being committed.     

N-PERSON NASH BNARGAINING WITH VARIABEL THREATS*

We consider two models of n-person bargaining problems with the endogenous determination of disagreement points. In the first model, which is a direct extension of Nash's variable threat bargaining model, the disagreement point is determined as an equilibrium threat point. In the second model, the disagreement point is given as a Nash equilibrium of the underlying noncooperative game. These models are formulated as extensive games, and axiomatizations of solutions are given for both models. It is argued that for games with more than two players, the first bargaining model does not preserve some important properties valid for two-person games, e.g., the uniqueness of equilibrium payoff vector. We also show that when the number of players is large, any equilibrium threat point becomes approximately a Nash equilibrium in the underlying noncooperative game, and vice versa. This result suggests that the difference between the two models becomes less significant when the number of players is large.