Guilt Shall Not Escape or Innocence Suffer? The Limits of Plea Bargaining When Defendant Guilt is Uncertain

This article examines optimal prosecutor behavior with respectto plea bargaining when defendant guilt is uncertain. I showthat when jury beliefs and behavior are determined endogenouslyin equilibrium along with defendant and prosecutor behavior,plea bargaining can play only a limited role in managing society'sconflicting desires to maximize punishment of the guilty andminimize punishment of the falsely accused. In particular, whileit can be optimal for prosecutors to use plea bargaining toinduce a large fraction of guilty defendants to voluntarilysort themselves from the innocent, such sorting must come atthe cost of imposing relatively short sentences on such guiltydefendants who accept plea bargains.     

Managing Equality in Social Dilemmas: Emotional and Retributive Implications

The equality rule is an important coordination rule in symmetric public good dilemmas. Although prior research emphasized that people use the equality rule out of efficiency concerns (as it helps to obtain the public good in the most efficient manner among group members), it may also reflect a true preference for fairness. More precisely, research examining emotional and retributive reactions as a result of a violation of the equality rule by a fellow group member showed that equality indeed is related to people’s personal values and what they consider to be fair. The present paper suggests that a violation of the equality rule results in emotional reactions, and these emotional experiences encourage further retributive actions. The different reactions following an equality violation are described as a function of three features: (1) the motives to use equality, (2) attributions for explaining the violation, and (3) the honesty of the given explanation. The write-up of this paper was partly supported by GOA/05/04 from the Research Fund of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. The research and write-up was supported by a fellowship of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO, Grant No. 016.005.019), awarded to the second author.     

Understanding the Unilateralist Turn in U.S. Foreign Policy

How should we explain the recent unilateralist turn in U.S. foreign policy? Some accounts treat growing American unilateralism as a passing aberration attributable to the neoconservative ideology of the Bush administration. This paper, by contrast, traces U.S. unilateralism to the structural effects, at home and abroad, of the end of the Cold War. Internationally, the removal of the Soviet threat has undermined the "institutional bargain" that once guided relations between the U.S. and its major allies. Absent Cold War imperatives, the U.S. is less willing to provide collective goods through strong international institutions and other states are less likely to defer to U.S. demands for special privileges that exempt the U.S. from normal multilateral constraints. Domestically, the end of the Cold War has weakened the ability of presidents to resist the appeals of powerful veto players whose interests are threatened by multilateral commitments. These factors suggest that American unilateralism may have deeper roots and more staying power than many expect.