Rethinking Threats

Résumé du livre

Threats are not merely the dark side of promises. They impose costs on those who receive them, and are likely to be particularly destructive when credible. This Article develops the factors that make for credibility in criminal, international, and other contexts. The credibility of a threat depends on the net cost of execution, subtleties regarding repeat play, and the calculus of secondary credibility - the likelihood that a threat will be carried out by the threatener or repeated by another party if the victim capitulates to the first. It then turns to situations in which a threatener can create credibility by dividing a threat into stages. A threat is often more credible if its execution has begun, so that the cost of completion is modest and now lower than the direct benefit expected from capitulation. Law itself, though designed to discourage threats and their execution, can perversely contribute to threatmaking by constituting just such a sunk cost, or first stage of a process. The implication is that in many situations law ought to focus its power on the final stage of a wrongdoer's plan.