Are "Gangstas" Peacocks? The Handicap Principle and Illicit Markets

Andrew Mell

No 558, Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics

Abstract: Criminals who wear gang colors are acting in a surprisingly brazen way which must increase the probability of being caught and punished by the police. In our model this brazen behavior is a solution to an enforcement problem. The central idea is that less able criminals see lower gains from continued participation in crime because they will be caught and punished more often. Lower future gains imply that reputational concerns will be less effective at enforcing honesty. Only dealing with brazen criminals will become a good way to avoid dealing with incompetent criminals, because they cannot afford to mimic the brazen behavior. The principle is similar to the selection for a handicap in evolutionary biology.

Keywords: Illegal behaviour and the enforcement of law; Information; Uncertainty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D80 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-07-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:8c35e991-77b2-443b-bcbf-178d6cd3fd70 (text/html)

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:oxf:wpaper:558

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anne Pouliquen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).