Private protection and public policing

Ross Hickey, Steeve Mongrain, Joanne Roberts and Tanguy van Ypersele

Journal of Public Economic Theory, 2021, vol. 23, issue 1, 5-28

Abstract: This paper looks at situations in which public and private protection are complementary, that is, when private protection must be coordinated with public protection to be effective. For example, home alarms deter theft by being connected to a local police station: if the police do not respond to a home alarm, the home alarm on its own is virtually useless in halting a crime in action. We make a distinction between gross and net complementarity and substitution, where the latter takes into account the effect on the crime rate. We show that when public and private protection are complements, the optimal provision of public protection trades off the manipulation effect of encouraging private protection with the compensatory effect of providing protection to households that do not privately invest. We discuss the implications of our results for policy and empirical research in this area.

Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/jpet.12473

Related works:
Working Paper: Private protection and public policing (2021)
Working Paper: Private Protection and Public Policing (2019)
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:bla:jpbect:v:23:y:2021:i:1:p:5-28

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=1097-3923

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Public Economic Theory is currently edited by Rabah Amir, Gareth Myles and Myrna Wooders

More articles in Journal of Public Economic Theory from Association for Public Economic Theory Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().