Optimal Preventive Law Enforcement and Stopping Standards

Murat C Mungan

American Law and Economics Review, 2018, vol. 20, issue 2, 289-317

Abstract: Preventive law enforcement increases social welfare by hindering the infliction of criminal harm, but produces inconvenience costs to the general public, because it requires interfering with the acts of innocents as well as attempters. The optimal amount of investment in preventive enforcement is greater than that which maximizes deterrence, but, smaller than that which minimizes criminal harm. Thus, ignoring preventive benefits and/or inconvenience costs results in an inefficient investment portfolio over enforcement methods, and in a predictable manner. Stopping standards, which determine the threshold suspicion required to trigger a stop, are tools that can be used to optimally trade-off the costs and benefits associated with preventive enforcement. The optimal stopping standard is weaker than its analogs in the trial context, namely standards of proof, which generally require preponderance of the evidence in civil trials and proof beyond a reasonable doubt in criminal trials. Finally, suspicionless stops can be optimal in a variety of circumstances, and are more likely optimal when enforcers perform poorly in forming suspicions; inconvenience costs are small; the population is unresponsive to deterrence measures; and the attempt rate is high.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/aler/ahy003 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:amlawe:v:20:y:2018:i:2:p:289-317.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

American Law and Economics Review is currently edited by J.J. Prescott and Albert Choi

More articles in American Law and Economics Review from American Law and Economics Association Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().