LAW & ECONOMICS WORKSHOP SERIES
presents
Kevin Davis
New York University School of Law
Multijurisdictional Enforcement Games
Tuesday, September 20, 2016
4:10 – 5.45
Solarium (room FA2) - Falconer Hall
84 Queen's Park
Economic analyses of law enforcement generally focus on situations in which law is enforced by a single public agency in a single jurisdiction which faithfully follows its announced enforcement strategy. This does not reflect the reality of enforcement aimed at corporate crime, which commonly involves multiple agencies, often based in different jurisdictions. This chapter will discuss the analysis of multijurisdictional law enforcement, with particular reference to cases concerning foreign bribery. The premise is that this kind of interaction can be modelled as a dynamic multi-player game in which the players include both enforcement agencies and firms. The first step is to describe the structure of the game: the range of possible players, the actions open to them, and their preferences over outcomes, as well as when the players act and what they know about other players’ actions. The next step is to discuss how the enforcement game is likely to be played, meaning what strategies firms and enforcement agencies are likely to adopt. In principle, this kind of analysis can be used to formulate testable hypotheses about outcomes of interactions between regulators and firms. Unfortunately, opportunities to evaluate these kinds of hypotheses empirically are limited because many aspects of the structure of the game are difficult to observe, and firms’ misconduct and regulators’ enforcement activities typically are only observable when they result in formal sanctions. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some of the challenges inherent in normative analysis of the outcomes of multi-jurisdictional law enforcement games.
Kevin Davis joined the NYU School of Law as Professor of Law in 2004. He was formerly a tenured member of the University of Toronto's Faculty of Law. He teaches courses on Contracts, Law and Development and Secured Transactions, as well as seminars on Financing Development and Contract Theory. His current research is focused on contract law, the governance of financial transactions involving developing countries, and the general relationship between law and economic development. Professor Davis received his B.A. in Economics from McGill University in 1990. After graduating with an LL.B. from the University of Toronto in 1993, he served as Law Clerk to Justice John Sopinka of the Supreme Court of Canada and later as an associate in the Toronto office of Torys, a Canadian law firm. After receiving an LL.M. from Columbia University in 1996, he was appointed an assistant professor at the University of Toronto and was promoted to associate professor in 2001. He has also been a visiting assistant professor at the University of Southern California, a visiting fellow at Cambridge University’s Clare Hall, and a visiting lecturer at the University of the West Indies in Barbados. He came to the NYU School of Law as a visiting professor in 2003.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
