Gambling jurisdictions around the world have adopted self-exclusion programs in which gamblers can voluntarily agree to be barred from further gambling. The popularity of self-exclusion stems from its aid in combating problem or pathological gambling, along with its non-coercive nature. To...

This is an unedited draft version of a paper that appeared in final form in Erich Goode, ed, The Handbook of Deviance, Wiley Handbooks in Criminology and Criminal Justice, 2015. The paper surveys the range of regulatory controls that are arrayed against vices such as excessive drug use and...

John Stuart Mill's harm principle maintains that adult behavior cannot justifiably be subject to social coercion unless the behavior involves harm or a significant risk of harm to non-consenting others. The absence of harms to others, however, is one of the distinguishing features of many...

The robustness principle for vice regulation suggests that public policy towards addictive or vicious activities engaged in by adults should be robust with respect to departures from full rationality. That is, policies should work pretty well if everyone is well-informed and completely rational,...

The reform era in Russia has been marked by a massive increase in reported crime, including organized crime. The purpose of this paper is to look more closely at the interaction between crime and economic reform measures. Widespread economic crime in the old system paved the way for the removal...

Most analyses of parallel markets in centrally planned systems focus on queue-rationing as the mechanism whereby state-sector goods become available for second economy resale. This article takes into account employee diversion of goods as a second channel through which merchandise can move to...

Most analyses of parallel markets in centrally-planned systems focus on queue-rationing as the mechanism whereby state-sector goods become available for second economy resale. This article takes into account employee diversion of goods as a second channel through which merchandise can move to...

Sunk costs and uncertainty characterize many public policy changes, as well as private investments. The Dixit-Pindyck theory of investment under uncertainty can then be applied to policy reforms, generating a positive option value to delaying a policy reform. The potential to adjust enforcement...

This paper examines how issues ranging from inflation to monopolization in the former Soviet Union are occasionally misdiagnosed, leading to sub-optimal prescriptions for reform. The misdiagnosis occurs because the pre-reform state of the Russian economy is often taken at face value as a...