Corporate liability and deterrence: a look into italian recent reforms.

The need for deterrence and repression of “corporate” crimes has led the international community to overtake the Latin axiom “societas delinquere non potest”, with the clear intention of identifying a specific kind of firm criminal liability. Therefore in such a context, the study and the comparison of the economic theories of corporate and individual criminal liability becomes crucial to determine the more efficient form of deterrence towards the minimization of social costs, considering their different capacity to internalize the externalities generated by crimes. In this literature our contribution is dedicated to understand if, and in which ways, corporate criminal liability models opportunely reflect the interdependent strategic behavior of firms and employees’; at the same time, the analysis focuses on how these norms and models evolve in order to take into account of the firm economic incentives. Our analysis, carried out with EAL approach, is focused on the exposition of the controversial and weak points that emerge from the enforcement of the Italian legislative decree 231/2001.