The negotiation raises a question: why reward someone who admits participation in a criminal scheme? In complex investigations, award-winning collaboration serves to obtain information and accelerate access to evidence, financial flows and assets. Whether Vorcaro’s eventual denunciation would be useful or desirable is another discussion; What I seek to do here is to use the case to illustrate the economic logic of this mechanism.
The agreement can result in a judicial pardon, a sentence reduction of up to two-thirds or a replacement sentence. But only when collaboration is voluntary and produces some result, such as identifying co-authors, revealing the structure of the criminal organization, preventing infractions, recovering values or locating victims. In the approval phase, the judge in the case examines regularity, legality and voluntariness, also ensuring that no conviction can be based solely on the employee’s word.
To understand how the tool works, we can resort to the prisoner’s dilemma, one of the best-known models. In it, two suspects are interrogated separately, after being detained with sufficient evidence for a conviction for a minor infraction, although the prosecution suspects a serious crime. If both remain silent, they will receive the lesser sentence. If one informs and the other remains silent, whoever spoke first goes scot-free, while the other pays for both crimes. If both inform, avoiding remaining silent while the other cooperates with the accusation, both are punished. That is, even when joint silence would be better, each suspect has an incentive to speak first, for fear of being the loyal fool while the other goes free.
Thus, the State changes incentives so that loyalty between accomplices is no longer rational. In the case of , although we do not have two suspects being interrogated simultaneously in isolated rooms, we have actors like Daniel Vorcaro and , whose bargaining capacity also depends on the timing of the collaboration. If one of them delivers elements that the research does not yet have, the value of the other’s proposal decreases.
Furthermore, whistleblowing involves information asymmetry between the parties. The collaborator knows, for example, which evidence would be more difficult to obtain without his help or which actors have a greater chance of not being caught. To deal with this problem, what is said needs to be compared with the evidence obtained, and the agreement can be undone if there is an intentional omission of relevant facts. The logic is similar to that of the used car market, where the buyer does not just trust the seller’s word and tries to protect himself from scams by taking the car to a trusted mechanic before closing a deal.
It is worth noting that whistleblowing does not transform the whistleblower into a source of truth, after all, we know that he speaks under encouragement and, therefore, his version is necessarily self-interested. The whistleblower can bring useful information, but can also shape their report to maximize benefits or protect those involved. Economically, the value of plea bargaining lies in changing incentives within the group: cohesion is no longer the best strategy, and the investigation gains access to information that would be unlikely to emerge otherwise.
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