窃品问题的经济学研究:一个文献综述

A Survey on the Economics Studies of Stolen Goods

现代经济学有关偷窃和窃品交易的论述始于贝克尔的“犯罪的经济学分析”一文。此后,这个领域内出现了丰富的文献,主要有偷窃活动的社会福利成本分析,偷窃规制及其效率的讨论,窃品交易及交易价格如何形成等。理论演进也大体经历了从宏观福利效应、经济效率分析到微观偷窃市场结构和价格形成机制的讨论。窃品定价价机制的进一步研究将是深化偷窃、窃品问题研究的主要突破口。

G. Becker＇s Crime and Punishment： an Economics Epproach has long been regarded as the beginning of theft analysis in the modern economics approach. Numerous papers have sprung up in this field, the very first of which being the social welfare concerns initiated in G. Tullock＇s The Welfare Costs of Tariffs, Monopolies and Theft in 1967. Tullock argued that in static analysis presuming that the original owner and the thief share a common value about the target, theft crime will only entail a minor transfer cost. Given the theft disturbances, however, the owner will afterwards reasonably invest a great deal in the hope of protecting his properties, while it might dynamically augment due to the rise of theft investment, both of which are directly unproductive. This situation results in an enormous reduction of the social welfare. MacChesney followed Tollck by showing that social welfare will be greatly hurt due to the “theft dynamic effect”. Another static approach was offered by R. Posner, who argued that the most important cost regarding the theft was the distortion of market transfer which was the most effective way of allocating resources. Hasem and McAdam appropriately reviewed the two approaches in their paper in 1997. Besides the social welfare concerns on theft, many researchers have devoted themselves to the search of an effective way to deter theft crime. Provided that the common knowledge that different methods can produce biased outcomes involving diverse costs, a logical conclusion could be that a careful budget planning including individual marginal productivity is very crucial, the thought of which can be found in the work of Becker, Toulder, Frank, Rowels and others. Katz has also designed a theft-reduction mechanism from the perspectives of the law and economics aiming at improving the welfare condition. After successful theft, the thief might commonly sell the stolen goods in the bLack market. Will the owner still occupy unchallenged rights against the good-faith buyer？ The answer will have to depend. Different legal establishments can influence the investment of the owners, thieves and the buyers in their own interests. Bensharar＇s paper demonstrates this image properly. Unfortunately, little effort has been exerted so far to determine stolen goods pricing. Zuesse was an exception. His paper tentatively offered a hypothesis for pricing in the black market. After a bird-eye search over economic literatures in this field, we found that an evolutionary route from the macroeconomic level, such as welfare effect, to the microeconomic level, like price mechanism, can be clearly identified. However, although there have been so many models with respect to the macro-level theft crime, there is still a lack of satisfactory explanations for the birth of the market of stolen goods, let alone its more complicated pricing system. At the end of this survey, we point out further possible directions for the studies aiming at some enlightening insights related to the pricing of stolen goods.