Lior Davidovitch and Yakov Ben-Haim
Law, Probability and Risk, to appear.
Abstract:
The economic theory of crime views criminals as rational decision makers, implying elastic response to law enforcement. Group-dependent elasticities can be exploited for efficient allocation of enforcement resources. However, profiling can augment both number of arrests and total crime, since non-profiled groups will increase their criminality. Elasticities are highly uncertain, so prediction is difficult and uncertainty must be accounted for in designing a profiling strategy. We use info-gap theory for satisficing (not minimizing) total crime rate. Using an empirical example, based on running red lights, we demonstrate the trade-off between robustness to uncertainty and total crime rate.
Keywords: Info-gap decision theory; profiling; severe uncertainty; satisficing.