In France, the comparution sur reconnaissance préalable de culpabilité (crpc) was introduced in 2004. This “French” plea bargaining caused many fears, in particular of an “Americanization” of French justice. In the United-States, economists fed the debate and showed that sentencing guidelines and the budget of the prosecutor affects the effectiveness of plea bargaining. This paper gives an overview of the literature focusing on two aspects: the revelation of information (to identify the guilty and avoid sentencing the innocent) and deterrence. We show that the literature on plea bargaining is at the crossroad of the economics of conflicts and the economics of crime.
Classification JEL: K14, K31, K4