Putting a price on drugs: An economic sociological study of price formation in illegal drug markets

Prices in illegal drug markets are difficult to predict. Based on qualitative interviews with 68 incarcerated drug dealers in Norway, we explore dealers’ perspectives on fair prices and the processes that influence their pricing decisions. Synthesized through economic sociology, we draw on perspectives from traditions as different as behavioral economics and cultural analysis to demonstrate how participants in illicit drug distribution base their pricing decisions on institutional context, social networks, and drug market cultures. We find that dealers take institutional constraints into consideration and search for niches with high earnings and low risks. The use of transactions embedded in social networks promotes a trusting form of governance, which enables strategic network management and expedient distribution but also uncompetitive pricing. Finally, dealers’ pricing decisions are embedded in three different cultures narratives: business, friendship, and street cultural stories, with widely varying implications for prices. Our findings demonstrate how an economic sociology of illicit drug distribution can extend insights from behavioral economics and cultural studies into a coherent criminology of illegal drug markets.     

From fragile to smart consumers: Shifting paradigm for the digital era

The use of digital technologies, functioning thanks to data processing, has been conquering many sectors of the world economy and it is possible that, in the near future, only a few markets will still be excluded from this industrial revolution. Therefore, even if one chose unreasonably to disregard the many innovations that the digital economy has brought about, its development seems quite inexorable, although it is true that this new stage in human progress raises some concerns. In particular, many worry about the millions of passive and powerless digital consumers who, facing a few huge and influential companies without any education or awareness, could succumb and find themselves poorer, victimized, and manipulated. The paper proposes to react to this state of affairs without further fueling the fear of the digital revolution and without the thought that regulation can be used only as a shield to protect fragile digital consumers. Rather, by taking inspiration from some regulatory actions undertaken by the European Union, the paper bears in mind that regulation can be used as a sword in the hands of consumers to finally assign them a lead role in digital markets. New rules to empower consumers and to make them take autonomous and independent decisions as to the management of their personal data as well as to the merits of digital firms can be envisaged. After all, one of the cultural roots of Western societies is that every individual should be enabled to be faber ipsius fortunae.     

Online platforms and pricing: Adapting abuse of dominance assessments to the economic reality of free products

Online platforms, which are at the forefront of today's economy, are subject to intensive competition law enforcement. However, the platform business model presents challenges for the application of competition law. Most notably, they appear to offer consumers a great number of their products for free. The explanation for most of these supposedly free products is offered by two-sided market theory: consumers may not be paying, but the ‘other’ side of the market is. This other side of the market often consists of advertisers, which pay the platform for access to the consumers’ information (to target advertisements) and attention (to show the advertisements). As many of these platforms are now potentially dominant, they come within the scope of competition law's abuse of dominance provision, including the doctrines of predatory and excessive pricing. These price-based theories need to adapt to the often price-less platform business model in order to prevent competition authorities from making both type I and type II enforcement errors. At the same time, competition law enforcement needs to consider—and at times give priority to—other branches of law that address abusive behaviour concerning free products. Through the use of case studies, this article therefore suggests ways in which abuse of dominance assessments can take into account the economic reality of free products.     

Breaching the levee,waiting for the flood. Testing beliefs about the internationalization of securities markets

Abstract

In the 1970s and 1980s, the three major securities markets in New York, London, and Tokyo underwent significant regulatory shifts that lowered national barriers to entry and liberalized the markets. Popular explanations point toward technologies, economic efficiencies, foreign policy pressures, the removal of controls on international capital flows, or international competition as unleashing forces promoting liberalization and breaching the regulatory levees. Such explanations generate expectations about behavior once the international pressures are unleashed. Significant changes in overseas participants' market behavior should be observable. International competitive pressures should produce convergence in regulatory and transaction costs across markets upon one of two equilibriums—one by competitive deregulations or another by harmonization through agreement. Empirical tests produce results inconsistent with such expectations. Foreign participation does increase following the breach in the regulatory levees, but the unleashed demand cannot be described as a flood. Observable measures of market dynamics and transaction costs remain distinctive. The inconsistencies between results and expectations raise questions about explanations that emphasize increasing interdependence and international pressures as driving domestic political and economic changes.     

Focused Deterrence Strategies and Crime Control

Research Summary

Focused deterrence strategies are increasingly being applied to prevent and control gang and group‐involved violence, overt drug markets, and individual repeat offenders. Our updated examination of the effects of focused deterrence strategies on crime followed the systematic review protocols and conventions of the Campbell Collaboration. Twenty‐four quasi‐experimental evaluations were identified in this systematic review. The results of our meta‐analysis demonstrate that focused deterrence strategies are associated with an overall statistically significant, moderate crime reduction effect. Nevertheless, program effect sizes varied by program type and were smaller for evaluations with more rigorous research designs.

Policy Implications

The available empirical evidence suggests these strategies generate noteworthy crime reduction impacts and should be part of a broader portfolio of crime reduction strategies available to policy makers and practitioners. Investments still need to be made, however, to strengthen the overall rigor of program evaluations and improve our understanding of key program activities associated with observed crime reduction impacts.     

Effects of Rock and Water: an intervention to prevent sexual aggression

Abstract

Sexual aggression among adolescents is a common problem which is related to lack of aggression regulation, positive or permissive attitudes towards sexual coercion, group pressure and inadequate communicative skills. Rock and Water is a psycho-physical intervention which addresses these issues. We conducted a quasi-experimental trial of Rock and Water in the Netherlands. In total, 521 boys aged 14–17 from nine pre-vocational education schools were included. The primary outcome variable was sexual aggression. Secondary outcomes were sexual interaction competence, self-regulation, attitudes towards dating violence, self-efficacy and self-esteem. Data were collected prior to the intervention, immediately after the intervention and five months after termination of the intervention. Boys reported a significant reduction in coercive strategies and particularly verbal manipulation (OR = .48). At follow-up, the boys reported a significant improvement in self-regulation and general self-efficacy (β = ?.11, p < .05 and β = 1.02, p <.05, respectively). Rock and Water was effective in decreasing verbal manipulation and improving self-regulation and general self-efficacy.     

On the Resilience of Illegal Drug Markets

This paper argues that the concept of resilience is a fruitful way of understanding the impact of repressive policies on illegal drug markets. For the purpose of this article, resilience is defined as the ability of market participants to preserve the existing levels of exchanges between buyers and sellers, despite external pressure aimed at disrupting the trade. The first part of the paper highlights how some of the core features of illegal drug markets, a decentralized structure and high prices, contribute to increasing their resilience to attacks. The second part develops a framework that can be used to compare markets on the basis of their resilient properties. Some of the empirical and policy implications of the framework are discussed in the conclusion.     

The emergence of the entrepreneurial state in contemporary China

As market reform has progressed in China, state bureaux have adapted and become entrepreneurial. This contradicts expectations that states will either simply retreat in the face of encroaching markets to play a minimal role in the economy, or obstruct market‐oriented change through bureaucratic conservatism or rent‐seeking. This paper describes the state entrepreneurialism that has appeared in the Chinese city of Tianjin in the early 1990s and explains its emergence as the consequence of both market‐induced structural transformation and the resultant changing incentives and demands on officials. It proposes the ‘entrepreneurial state’ as a model of state adaptation to marketization and assesses its implications for both our conception of the developmental state and for anticipation of rent‐seeking and resistance to market reform.     

“Ragged urchins play on marquetry floors”: The discourse of filtering is reconstructed, 1920s–1950s

The idea of filtering has played a key role in our understanding of housing markets and in framing federal policy. The origins of the idea, however, and of the term itself, are poorly understood. Drawing loosely on the approach of discourse analysis, this article clarifies both issues, arguing that language shapes how we think about housing policy, and indeed policy itself. The concept of filtering emerged in Great Britain in the late nineteenth century where, by 1900, it informed arguments in favor of municipal (public) housing. It became influential in the United States in the 1920s but in 1938 was still referred to in different ways, notably as “hand-me-down housing.” Here, it was understood more narrowly, as an alternative to public housing. After 1939, the Federal Housing Administration, though not its leading consultant Homer Hoyt, popularized the term “filtering.” The neutral connotations of this metaphorical term suited the agency's goal of developing an apparently objective discourse of housing markets and market analysis. The term was normalized by the early 1960s.