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The system for the adoption of children is not working well. The dysfunction of the adoption system manifests itself in an excess demand for healthy white babies and excess supply of older children, minority children, or those with disabilities. A market solution can increase the number of adoptions for older children, minority children or children with disabilities. Recognizing the heterogeneity of children and taking account of those differences will yield price differentiation in segmented markets. Such differentiation is especially important in the market for adopted children where the lifetime consequences of a poor match can be severe; more information about child attributes can only improve child-adopter matches. Revenues from the sale of adoption rights for highly demanded children could subsidize the adoption of the less desired children. The time to adoption will decrease and more of the less desired children will be adopted; the sum of consumer (adoptive parents) plus producer (biological mothers or the adoption agencies) surplus will rise and eliminate sub rosa markets for the more desired children.

Public security agency response to a call for emergency service is a commons good. As consumers demand more of the commons good there is increased congestion. Police services as a commons good are modeled using the uncertainty about which calls for service are bona fide. The results are that optimal alarm systems per officer rise with the officers’ wage, fall with the value of avoided losses and rise with the productivity of officers. Ceteris paribus, avoided losses are greater in the community with more alarm systems. Homogeneity of the community increases the optimal number of alarms per officer. Fining ‘well-behaved’ alarm owners more heavily increases police productivity. 1I ntroduction All service providers responsible for emergency response suffer from a high rate of false calls that consume significant amounts of resources. 1 The high incidence of false calls could hinder first response efforts in the event of a terrorist attack and cause a wasteful use of local resources. The question is whether first responders can mitigate the incidence of false calls. We consider the particular case of burglar alarms to illustrate the impact of an appropriate public policy on calls for emergency service. The issue and the solution of the response to burglar alarms can be applied to other emergency services as well. The false alarm rate for burglar alarm activations is 94‐99 per cent 2 in the USA, Canada, Great Britain and New Zealand. The cost of response to

This article investigates home attributes that attract residential burglars in choosing a target. These attributes are the location of the home, its physical appearance, demographic characteristics of the residents, and the security precautions present. The theoretical foundation of the empirical model is the criminal utility maximization behavior that considers costs and benefits as formulated by Becker. However, this article introduces to the model the spatial dimension of the burglar's search for a target. The incidence of burglary is the dependent variable and is measured in a dichotomy scale. The empirical analysis utilizes a survey database of burgled and non-burgled homes that was conducted by the researchers. A logit model is used for the investigation, and the effects of the explanatory variables are calculated as probabilities. The database is unique in the wealth of attributes of individual homes that are relevant to burglars' decision process.

This paper applies household survey data to discern a pattern of, and subsequently propose preventative solutions to, suburban property crime. Specifically, 22,192 households in Greenwich, Connecticut were urged to respond to a questionnaire. The survey included questions that measure the household’s proneness to victimization and its level of precautionary activities. The probability of victimization is estimated by applying the SAS/STAT program. The study considers the properties of the Deterrence Hypothesis and the rational behavior of burglars. The Deterrence Hypothesis is associated with the relative effectiveness of criminal justice. The focus is on the deterrence activities initiated by homeowners to reduce the probability of being burglarized. It details the results of a logistic regression analysis applied to individual households. The probability of residential burglary is calculated by accounting for the location, surroundings and attributes of the residences, as well as a variety of security precautionary measures.

Home surveys and ethnographic studies have demonstrated that alarms are effective in deterring intruders. Local police departments across North America, however, face significant difficulties in responding to ever-increasing false activations and in managing alarm registrations. Local, county, and state governments must know whether alarms create a net benefit or a net burden to society as a whole. In this paper, all social costs and benefits are computed, and a positive annualized social net benefit is realized. Benefits include avoidance of property losses and personal injuries from both burglary and fire. Costs include installation and utility charges for systems and police response. The results of the analysis provide public policy suggestions for police involvement in alarm activities and for effective alarm-related ordinances.

In the long run a positive relationship of police expenditurescrime is derived in models which explain criminal behavior In the short run, however, the statistical results point to the possible deterring effect of police expenditures. A theoretical model is constructed to explain the statistical difference of the short and long run effect of police outlays on crime. As police expenditures increase, crime level diminishes. As time elapses, criminals may adjust to the new level of police effort, improve their performance and at the same level of outlays, increase their criminal activities. This phenomenon could be termed “Criminals’Learning by Doing”. It could explain why, over the long run, the level of crime is positively associated with police expenditures. The empirical analysis examines pooled cross sectional time series of 47 states over the period 1970 to 1980—a total of 517 cases.

In general, economists have modeled criminal behavior as a problem in time allocation under uncertainty. Their Friedman-Savage utility models have been based on the binomial probability distribution and then tested using aggregate data on crime rates and neglect the nonpecuniary aspects of crime. This paper overcomes the shortcomings of previous work. Specifically, criminal activity is modeled with an underlying geometric probability process and explicitly accounts for the moral and social compromise involved in becoming a criminal. The empirical model enables the quantification of the criminaFs moral and social sensitivity using data based on a consolidated file of police records and a cohort survey of criminals and noncriminals. On the basis of this unique data set, it is found that the included individual~criminals are risk averse and that gang membership reduces social sensitivity.