Social stigma and asymmetric appeal powers: an ACE implementation
The paper has been presented at the conference of the European Association Law and Economics 2006 in Madrid. Download the paper.
Abstract
Asymmetric appeal powers tilt the error ratio of criminal procedure (type I/type II) towards the interests of the defendant. Better that ten guilty escape than that one innocent should suffer (Blackstone, 1766). Why is it better? To date there is solid evidence that societies consistently adhere by the Blackstonian auspice, however there seems to be no economic account of why this is the case. We provide here a possible explanation based on a signaling theory of asymmetric appeal powers: if criminal sanctions are signals that agents in society use to assess whether and how much stigma attribute to other agents, then an asymmetrical criminal procedure delivers a more reliable signal. We explore some implications of the model with an agent-based computational economics implementation.
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