Paying the Price for Being Caught: the Economics of Manifest and non-Manifest Theft in Roman

• Autores: Nuno Garoupa, Fernando Gómez Pomar
• Localización: Indret: Revista para el Análisis del Derecho, ISSN-e 1698-739X, Nº. 1, 2005
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In Roman Law, manifest theft (essentially, the one in which a thief was caught in the act) was punished with a more severe penalty than non-manifest theft. This legal policy seems to contradict the multiplier principle and efficient deterrence. Apparently, we should expect the penalty for manifest theft to be lower than for non-manifest theft since the probability of detection and conviction is higher for the former and lower for the latter. In this paper, we provide several efficiency-based arguments to solve the puzzle.