Learning from Law Enforcement

Dynamic Optimal Law Enforcement with Learning

We incorporate the process of enforcement learning by assuming that the agency's current marginal cost is a decreasing function of its past experience of detecting and convicting. The agency accumulates data and information (on criminals, on opportunities of crime) enhancing the ability to apprehend in the future at a lower marginal cost. We focus on the impact of enforcement learning on optima...

Law enforcement in norm-governed learning agents

We study law enforcement mechanisms within a population of norm-governed learning agents. We show that a traditional analysis based on expected utility can be misleading, because learning agents tend to comply even though their surveillance is stopped. This has significant implications for the design of self-organising institutions with endogenous resources, where the cost of monitoring and nor...

Psychotherapy as law enforcement.

Legal doctrines do not stand still, but instead evolve and tend to grow and to spawn what law school academicians fondly term progeny. Tarasoff is no exception. In an expanding list of court decisions, psychiatric patients are being convicted of crimes by virtue of actions by their psychiatrists or psychotherapists purportedly based on the duty to warn. One recent case has featured surreptitiou...

Wanted: Uniform Law Enforcement

Inefficiently Automated Law Enforcement

For some crimes the entire law enforcement process can now be automated. No humans are needed to detect the crime, identify the perpetrator, or impose punishment. While automated systems are cheap and efficient, governments and citizens must look beyond these obvious savings as manual labor is replaced by robots and computers. Inefficiency and indeterminacy have significant value in automated l...