Crime as Strategy: Testing an Evolutionary Ecological Theory of Expropriative Crime

This article presents a refined specification of Cohen and Machalek's general evolutionary ecological theory of expropriative crime and results of tests employing two complementary approaches: (1) the development of a game-theoretic model that mathematically tests the logical adequacy of the theory's fundamental assumptions and (2) the conduct of computer simulation experiments to analyze the model's behavior and test its consistency with novel hypotheses suggested by the theory. Mathematical analysis indicates that the assumptions are logically consistent. Experiments generally confirm the theory's hypotheses, but indicate that several modifications are necessary. Additional theoretical insights obtained from the simulation experiments are also discussed.