Abstract: Why is plea bargaining commonly employed in some countries,
while its use is heavily restricted in others? I develop a formal model
in which a social planner, who minimizes the social harms from punishing
the innocent and not punishing the guilty, considers the effect
of different plea bargaining regimes on law enforcement agencies and
individuals, and decides on the optimal scope of plea bargaining. The
model shows that higher levels of crime and a greater social emphasis
on ensuring that guilty individuals are punished lead to a greater use
of plea bargaining, while lower levels of crime and a greater social emphasis
on ensuring that innocent individuals are not punished leads
to less use of plea bargaining. Using new cross-country data on social
preferences for punishing the innocent versus not punishing the guilty
together with crime data, and a new coding of plea bargaining regimes
across countries, I obtain results that are consistent with the model’s predictions.