Economists studying public policy have generally assumed that the relevant social planner knows how policy affects population behavior. Planners typically do not possess all of this knowledge, so there is reason to consider policy formation with partial knowledge of policy impacts. Here I consider the choice of a profiling policy where decisions to search for evidence of crime may vary with observable covariates of the persons at risk of being searched. To begin I pose a planning problem whose objective is to minimize the utilitarian social cost of crime and search. The consequences of candidate search rules depends on the extent to which search deters crime. Deterrence is expressed through the offense function, which describes how the offense rate of persons with given covariates varies with the search rate applied to these persons. I study the planning problem when the planner has partial knowledge of the offense function. To demonstrate general ideas, I suppose that the planner observes the offense rates of a study population whose search rule has previously been chosen. He knows that the offense rate weakly decreases as the search rate increases, but he does not know the magnitude of the deterrent effect of search. In this setting, I first show how the planner can eliminate dominated search rules and then how he can use the minimax or minimax-regret criterion to choose an undominated search rule.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
11848.
Length: Date of creation: Dec 2005 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:11848
Note: PE Contact details of provider: Postal: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A. Phone: 617-868-3900 Email: Web page: http://www.nber.org More information through EDIRC
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: ().
Find related papers by JEL classification: H8 - Public Economics - - Miscellaneous Issues K4 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior D8 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)