Crime, punishment and social norms

Jörgen Weibull and Edgar Villa

No 610, SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance from Stockholm School of Economics

Abstract: We analyze the interplay between economic incentives and social norms when individuals decide whether or not to engage in criminal activity. More specifically, we assume that there is a social norm against criminal activity and that deviations from the norm result in feelings of guilt or shame. The intensity of these feelings is here endogenous in the sense that they are stronger when the population fraction obeying the norm is larger. As a consequence, a gradual reduction of the sanctions against criminal activity, or of the taxation of legal incomes, may weaken the social norm against crime. Due to the potential multiplicity of equilibria in our model, such a gradual change may even induce a discontinuous increase in the crime rate. We show that law enforcement policies may have dramatic and permanent efects on the crime rate, and lead to hysteresis. We also define political equilibrium under majority rule and show how a majority of individuals, who feel no guilt or shame from violating the law, in political equilibrium can exploit a minority who do have such feelings.

Keywords: crime; punishment; social norm; political equilibrium (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D01 D11 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2005-11-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo, nep-reg, nep-soc and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

Downloads: (external link)
http://swopec.hhs.se/hastef/papers/hastef0610.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:hastef:0610

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance from Stockholm School of Economics The Economic Research Institute, Stockholm School of Economics, P.O. Box 6501, 113 83 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Helena Lundin ().