The article analyzes public and private law enforcement when the government is motivated partially or entirely by rent-seeking. The model compares and contrasts the optimal law enforcement policies chosen by a benevolent, social welfare-maximizing government and a self-interested, rent-seeking...

We incorporate the process of enforcement learning by assuming that the agency's current marginal cost is a decreasing function of its past experience of detecting and convicting. The agency accumulates data and information (on criminals, on opportunities of crime) enhancing the ability to...

In this paper, we take an organizational view of organized crime. In particular, we study the organizational consequences of product illegality attending at the following characteristics: (i) contracts are not enforceable in court, (ii) all participants are subject to the risk of being punished,...

I consider a general specification of criminals' objective function and argue that, when the general non-expected utility theory is substituted for the traditional expected utility theory, the high-fine-low-probability result (Becker, 1968) only holds under specific and strong restrictions