Law & Economics
Portrait of Gary S. Becker
Scholar portraitSource: Wikimedia Commons

Becker

Gary S. Becker

Economist of human behavior, public enforcement, and deterrence

deterrencepublic enforcementhuman behavior

Official Source Note

Chicago Booth's Nobel profile describes Becker as a scholar who extended microeconomic analysis to human behavior, including crime, discrimination, family behavior, and human capital. Nobel materials identify him as the 1992 economics laureate for extending microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behavior and interaction.

Becker is included because Crime and Punishment gives legal researchers the basic expected-sanction model for studying public enforcement, deterrence, compliance, and the social cost of punishment.

Source: University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Relevance to the Archive

For legal research, Becker supplies the expected-sanction framework behind public enforcement: legal compliance depends on detection probability, sanction magnitude, enforcement costs, and alternative behavior.

Representative Contributions

  • Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach (1968)
  • The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (1976)
  • A Treatise on the Family (1981)

Works Included Here