Criminals and risk attitude

Eric Langlais

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: We show that whatever the representation of criminals' preferences under risk, the assumption according to which they are strongly risk averse individuals is not consistent with the available observations establishing that criminals are more sensitive to shifts in the probability of sanction than to changes in the level of the sanction. We suggest that: 1/ while a weakening of the risk aversion assumption may be useful, the risk seeking assumption may be better suited for criminals; 2/ the relevant assumption regarding criminals' risk attitude may depend on the policy instruments that models of crime deterrence take into account; 3/ additional experiments, including both monetary penalties and non monetary sanctions would be useful in order to learn more about their sensibility to probability, monetary and non monetary sanctions.

Keywords: Risk aversion; monetary and non monetary sanctions; State Dependent preferences and RDEU models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D81 K40 K41 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-06, Revised 2006-09-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:1149

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