Ambiguity and enforcement
研究了执法机构是否应公开资源分配策略以最小化犯罪,理论表明取决于罪犯对不确定性的态度,实验发现执法行为接近最优。
Abstract Law enforcement officials face numerous decisions regarding their enforcement choices. One important decision, that is often controversial, is the amount of knowledge that law enforcement distributes to the community regarding their policing strategies. Assuming the goal is to minimize criminal activity (alternatively, maximize citation rates), our theoretical analysis suggests that agencies should reveal (shroud) their resource allocation if criminals are uncertainty seeking, and shroud (reveal) their allocation if criminals are uncertainty averse. We run a laboratory experiment to test our theoretical framework, and find that enforcement behavior is approximately optimal given the observed non-expected utility uncertainty preferences of criminals.