The Impact of Law Enforcement Design on Legal Compliance The Impact of Law Enforcement Design on Legal Compliance

This paper presents experimental evidence on the way in which the design of law enforce-ment impacts legal compliance. The experiment includes two law enforcement designs: one in which sanctioning results in victim-compensation and one in which sanctions are rent-seeking devices for the enforcer. We show that in the rent-seeking design (i) poten-tial violators choose non-compliance more often and (ii) the average violator tries to avoid detection less aggressively