Breaking the Chain: Division Norms and Criminal Deterrence

Abstract

In organized crime, membership can adjust around enforcement while division norms remain in place. We model this in three stages: division norms fix how every possible coalition divides its proceeds; the authority then attaches deterrence capacity to named members before knowing which coalition will form; membership adjusts last, among those who remain undeterred. Under population-monotone division, where no incumbent loses rent as a coalition expands, the minimum budget needed to block every coalition is the cost of a shortest dismantling path, removing one member at a time. A high-rent hub can be the best first target because her removal lowers the rents of those who remain. Holding coalition proceeds fixed, the Shapley value applied to every coalition uniquely maximizes this budget among population-monotone norms whenever it is itself population monotone. It does so by making every removal order equally costly. Allowing part of the proceeds to be reallocated after capacities are observed weakly raises the budget for any fixed population-monotone norm, although exact Shapley optimality can fail even when the reallocated share is arbitrarily small.