On 28th November OxTalks will move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events' (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
There will be an OxTalks freeze beginning on Friday 14th November. This means you will need to publish any of your known events to OxTalks by then as there will be no facility to publish or edit events in that fortnight. During the freeze, all events will be migrated to the new Oxford Events site. It will still be possible to view events on OxTalks during this time.
If you have any questions, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Sign up for meetings on the sheet below:
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13ovx0deRg8mA3h5XVO95SLGQcZQMTAcbZiTKaGFTKvs/edit#gid=0
If signing up less than two days before the talk, please also email facultyadmin@economics.ox.ac.uk
Abstract:
This paper proposes a modern mechanism design approach to study welfare-maximizing sentencing schemes in criminal justice systems. We provide a framework for reducing a complex judicial process to a single-agent, direct-revelation mechanism focused on the defendant, and identify a commitment assumption that justifies optimizing over this class of mechanisms. We characterize the generically unique optimal mechanisms for two notions of welfare distinguished by their treatment of deterrence. These mechanisms shed new light on features of the criminal justice system in the United States, from the prevalence of extreme, binary verdicts and plea bargains to the use of jury instructions and an adversarial system, all of which emerge as the result of informational, commitment, and incentive arguments.
