Psychologists, such as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, challenge the major assumptions of microeconomics: the rational pursuit of self-interest given unchanging tastes. These issues are explored through a questionnaire that may be distributed in class. How many of your students behave as...

This paper utilizes a spatial competition model to analyze criminal activity. Criminals are heterogeneous in their cost of providing illegal goods and compete by choosing a location and a price for the distribution of the illegal goods to clients. The locational choice of criminals and law...

DeAngelo et al. (2006) have recently used the AWS criterion in a M/G/1 queuing model to show that there is no necessary tension between economic cost minimization and inspection stringency in non-native species management. In this paper, we use an alternate cost criterion (AWQ criterion) to...

We investigate judicial election's impact on criminal case handling. Data from appeals of felony convictions in New York state are used to measure the accuracy of lower court outcomes. We also account for judicial election pressures and career paths. A theoretical model is developed where to...

We investigate judicial election's impact on criminal case handling. Data from appeals of felony convictions in New York state are used to measure the accuracy of lower court outcomes. We also account for judicial election pressures and career paths. A theoretical model is developed where to...

Researchers have paid scant attention to matchmaking from the perspective of a matchmaker. Therefore, our purpose is to analyze the circumstances under which a matchmaker optimally accepts or rejects individual matching assignments. We concentrate on two specific cases. In the first (second)...

A substantial theoretical literature identifies two general approaches to deterring anti-social behavior: public police actions (specialized enforcement) to monitor and punish proscribed behavior, and private actions (community enforcement) to discourage both illegal and legal, anti-social...

We examine the effect of private maritime security on international public safety by analyzing International Maritime Organization vessel security data from 2007-2014. During this time a considerable spike in maritime piracy occurred in East Africa, West Africa and East Asia. We exploit the fact...

Increasing penalty structures for repeat offenses are ubiquitous in penal codes, despite little empirical or theoretical support. Multi-period models of criminal enforcement based on the standard economic approach of Becker (1968) generally find that the optimal penalty structure is either flat...

Goods for which demand greatly exceeds supply are frequently allocated to citizens using queuing mechanisms. However, violence can occur either when queues are very long or when large numbers of citizens are not provided goods being allocated with queuing mechanisms. Hence, we use the theory of...