Berkeley Program in Law and Economics

This work develops an agent-based model to study the emergent properties due to public enforcement of criminal law. In order to build a model of criminal behavior suitable to the project the economic analysis of crime is used as the basic framework, most specially Becker’s (1968) seminal work, but also Shavell and Polinsky (2000), Shavell (2004), Cohen and Felson (1979) and Clarke (1995). The mainstream has been the economic analysis of law, which considers the agent as a rational decision maker. The model was implemented using NetLogo 3.1.4, a multiagent software platform (Wilensky, 1999). The simulation program provides a wide range of dynamic options making it easy to perform any kind of test in order to assess the behavior of a given criminal rule in its dynamic operation. Validation and experimental tests were performed. The resulting responses were consistent with the theoretical basis on which the model was based on.