Understanding recurrent crime as system-immanent collective behavior

Containing the spreading of crime is a major challenge for society. Yet, since thousands of years, no effective strategy has been found to overcome crime. To the contrary, empirical evidence shows that crime is recurrent, a fact that is not captured well by rational choice theories of crime. According to these, strong enough punishment should prevent crime from happening. To gain a better understanding of the relationship between crime and punishment, we consider that the latter requires prior discovery of illicit behavior and study a spatial version of the inspection game. Simulations reveal the spontaneous emergence of cyclic dominance between ''criminals'', ''inspectors'', and ''ordinary people'' as a consequence of spatial interactions. Such cycles dominate the evolutionary process, in particular when the temptation to commit crime or the cost of inspection are low or moderate. Yet, there are also critical parameter values beyond which cycles cease to exist and the population is dominated either by a stable mixture of criminals and inspectors or one of these two strategies alone. Both continuous and discontinuous phase transitions to different final states are possible, indicating that successful strategies to contain crime can be very much counter-intuitive and complex. Our results demonstrate that spatial interactions are crucial for the evolutionary outcome of the inspection game, and they also reveal why criminal behavior is likely to be recurrent rather than evolving towards an equilibrium with monotonous parameter dependencies.Comment: 9 two-column pages, 5 figures; accepted for publication in PLoS ON

Anti-terrorism politics and the risk of provoking

A population''s level of terrorism depends on two factors: people''s preferences (would they like creating damage?) and the constraints under which people act (what damage could they create, and at what punishment?). Cause-related policies, e.g. improving social stability or education, aim at appeasing preferences, thereby reducing terrorism. Symptom-related policies, e.g. embargoes or wars, change the constraints (`deterrence''), but may have side effects on preferences (`provocation''); terrorism increases if provocation overweighs deterrence. I model preferences for damage as endogenous and policy-dependent. I argue that provocation by tough policies is easy to overlook, and show that provocation-neglect leads to toughness-exaggeration.microeconomics ;

Does ignorance promote norm compliance?

A large extent of undetected norm violations may have positive effects for society. If many norm violations are hidden, society seems to be in good order so that actors are more willing to comply with the norms themselves. In this sense, ignorance promotes norm compliance. We challenge this view by arguing that in scenarios, in which norms are controlled and enforced by third parties who receive rewards for their success, the opposite is true: Ignorance promotes norm violations. The reason is that unsuspicious inspectors who believe that little hidden norm violations are committed will spend less effort for detection, some formerly detected norm violations will go undetected, norm targets will be less deterred from the lower detection probability and will commit more norm violations over time. This article develops a respective mathematical model and confirms the above described intuitio

Pillars of Trust: An Experimental Study on Reputation and Its Effects

This paper presents the results of laboratory experiments on the relevance of reputation for trust and cooperation in social interaction. We have extended a repeated investment game by adding new treatments where reputation is taken more explicitly into account than before. We then compared treatments where the investor and the trustee rate each other and treatments where the investor and the trustee were rated by a third party. The results showed that: (i) third party reputation positively affects cooperation by encapsulating trust; (ii) certain differences in the reputation mechanism can generate different cooperation outcomes. These results have interesting implications for the recent sociological debate on the normative pillars of markets

Cognitive Systems For Revenge and Forgiveness

Minimizing the costs that others impose upon oneself and upon those in whom one has a fitness stake, such as kin and allies, is a key adaptive problem for many organisms. Our ancestors regularly faced such adaptive problems (including homicide, bodily harm, theft, mate poaching, cuckoldry, reputational damage, sexual aggression, and the infliction of these costs on one\u27s offspring, mates, coalition partners, or friends). One solution to this problem is to impose retaliatory costs on an aggressor so that the aggressor and other observers will lower their estimates of the net benefits to be gained from exploiting the retaliator in the future. We posit that humans have an evolved cognitive system that implements this strategy - deterrence - which we conceptualize as a revenge system. The revenge system produces a second adaptive problem: losing downstream gains from the individual on whom retaliatory costs have been imposed. We posit, consequently, a subsidiary computational system designed to restore particular relationships after cost-imposing interactions by inhibiting revenge and motivating behaviors that signal benevolence for the harmdoer. The operation of these systems depends on estimating the risk of future exploitation by the harmdoer and the expected future value of the relationship with the harmdoer. We review empirical evidence regarding the operation of these systems, discuss the causes of cultural and individual differences in their outputs, and sketch their computational architecture

How norms can generate conflict

Norms play an important role in establishing social order. The current literature focuses on the emergence, maintenance and impact of norms with regard to coordination and cooperation. However, the issue of norm-related conflict deserves more attention. We develop a general theory of "normative conflict" by differentiating between two different kinds of conflict. The first results from distinct expectations of which means should be chosen to fulfil the norm, the second from distinct expectations of how strong the norm should restrain the self-interest. We demonstrate the empirical relevance of normative conflict in an experiment that applies the "strategy method" to the ultimatum game. Our data reveal normative conflict among different types of actors, in particular among egoistic, equity, equality and "cherry picker" types.Social norms, normative conflict, cooperation, ultimatum game, strategy method, equity

The Impact of Agent-Based Models in the Social Sciences after 15 Years of Incursions

This paper provides an overview on the impact of agent-based models in the social sciences. It focuses on the reasons why agent-based models are seen as important innovations in the recent decades. It is aimed to evaluate the impact of this innovation on various disciplines, such as economics, sociology, anthropology, and behavioural sciences. It discusses the advances it contributed to achieve and illustrates some comparatively new fields to which it gave rise. Finally, it emphasizes some research issues that need to be addressed in the future

Sex Torts

America has a serious sexual problem. The sexual practices of a small percentage of Americans has created an unprecedented disease rate that is costing the American public about $20 billion per year. Lawsuits seeking damages for sexual disease transmission are on the rise, yet current sex tort law is mired with anti-heartbalm sentiment, is unpredictable, and is failing as a tool of deterrence, compensation, and education. This Article discusses the gravity of the sexual disease crisis, part of which is the public’s incredible ignorance about the rate of sexual disease, and tort law’s failure to do its part to help educate the public and deter irresponsible sexual behavior. This Article concludes that, based on the high degree of risk involved in irresponsible sex, and the problems created by the current negligence-based analytical paradigm, strict liability for sexual disease transmission should be adopted. Strict liability would deter sexual disease transmission, and educate the public about the sexual disease epidemic, more effectively than negligence