Modeling the offense decision: a critical survey

In what follows we contrast the alternative model specifications which have been adopted by economists to explain criminal behavior. Four classes of models are presented, which, to our knowledge, include all models in the economic literature as special case

A note on a compound distribution: the demand for hospital beds

There has been growing interest in the past few years in the economics of medical services. Due to the nature of the medical industry a number of problems heretofore considered to be of minor importance have assumed major proportions. It is the purpose of this paper to present a model for predicting the demand for hospital beds, which is free from a rather serious specification error. This error arises from a failure to recognize the nature of the underlying stochastic mechanism and is by no means unique to the demand for hospital beds. Indeed, the demand for hospital beds is merely the vehicle used in explicating, what seems to be, an often overlooked source of error

Demand for Refined Lead

This paper is part of a Ph.D. dissertation submitted by the author to the Graduate College, University of Iowa, and was partially supported by the National Science Foundation Grant GS-1491. The author acknowledges the guidance and encouragement received from Professor S. Y. Wu

Rigid pricing policies and profit maximization

In this paper we present a model of a profit maximizing firm in which one price is set for the entire multiperiod planning horizon. One of the consequences of such a pricing policy, if one employs widely used assumptions about demand and cost functions, is a decision rule for choosing the optimal price which may be interpreted as the full -cost pricing equation of much recent controversy. The significance of this result lies in the fact that full-cost pricing and profit maximization have often been held to be inconsistent. In addition, this model integrates the pricing decision with the other decisions taken by the firm

The models of economic choice theory: a paradigm for non-economists

The ultimate goal of social science is to explain individual and group behavior within given institutional constraints. In practice this means developing models which effectively describe and predict human behavior. Recent experience has shown a particular approach to modeling individual behavior to be especially useful. The approach in question has been developed by economists and consists of using the analytical structure of utility theory to focus attention on the determinants of individual choice and then analyzing the responsiveness of individual choices to changes in these determinants. The success of model building in this format is evidenced by the fact that a major portion of microeconomic theory is now known as choice theory

A stochastic model of wildfire ignitions and damages

A model of the production of wildfire ignitions and damages is developed and used to determine wildland activity-regulation decisions which minimize total expected cost-plus-loss due to wildfires. In this context, the implications of various policy decisions are considered. The resulting decision rules take a form which makes it possible for existing wildfire management agencies to readily adopt them upon collection of the required data

A Labor Theoretic Analysis of the Criminal Choice

Although many criminal choice problems may be viewed within an expanded labor choice framework, care must be exercised if these problems are to be interpreted in terms of strictly monetary costs and benefits. We show below that by not fully specifying their choice problems, and therefore the transformation between what is inherently a multiattribute decision problem and the wealth-only problem, Becker, Ehrlich, and Sjoquist are led to conclusions which are valid only in very special cases. In general, we show that plausible preference restrictions are not sufficient to generate unambiguous supply results, a result that should come as no surprise since it is the same situation that confronts the investigator in most household allocation problems. Therefore, policy prescriptions in this area, as in the tax incentive area, do not follow from theory but rather require empirical determination of relative magnitudes

Stochastic Reserve Losses

In an article in the September, 1961, issue of the A.merican Economic Review, Daniel Orr and W. G. Mellon introduced the notion of uncertainty into the well-known comparative static analysis of bank credit expansion. (1) This paper discusses their findings, the nature of their assumptions, and some possible extensions of their results

Law Enforcement Agencies as Multiproduct Firms: Correcting Some Misconceptions

The comment by Pyle and Deadman [PD] on our paper deals with several points which arise regularly in empirical applications of economic theory and especially in applications in which firms do not operate in traditional market places. Their first point concerns the appropriate definition of output in law enforcement agencies: Is the final output deterrence of future crimes, solving existing crimes, both, or something else? PD argue that deterrence {crime prevention) is the primary output of law enforcement agencies, and from society\u27s perspective, this is undoubtedly true. But as we attempted to make clear in our paper, we were interested in modeling the decision process of an individual agency. Conversations, both with academics working in the area of law enforcement and with practitioners, convinced us that on a day to day basis, police departments were much more likely to be interested in solving crimes than in deterrence

The multi-output translog production cost function: the case of law enforcement agencies

In this paper we study the relationship between costs, input prices and activity levels in a sample of approximately thirty medium sized city police departments for the years 1968, 69, 71 and 73. Our interest lies in determining the functional structure of law enforcement production technology