Mungan & Klick on Discounting and Criminals' Implied Risk Preferences

Murat C. Mungan and Jonathan Klick (Florida State University - College of Law and University of Pennsylvania Law School) have posted Discounting and Criminals' Implied Risk Preferences on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

It is commonly assumed that potential offenders are more responsive to increases in the certainty than increases in the severity of punishment. An important implication of this assumption within the Beckerian law enforcement model is that criminals are risk-seeking. This note adds to existing literature by showing that offenders who discount future monetary benefits can be more responsive to the certainty rather than the severity of punishment, even when they are risk averse, and even when their disutility from imprisonment rises proportionally (or more than proportionally) with the length of the sentence.