An Economic Analysis of Stalking

When does ordinary, legal interpersonal attention behaviour become aberrant, illegal stalking behaviour? How do we stop it when it does? As a society, we have only recently recognized stalking (episodic, continued unwanted contact of one person by another) as criminal behaviour—that it ranges well beyond the merely bothersome and creates real hardships for victims, famous or not. In the United States, formally codified anti-stalking law first appeared in the 1990s, and it continues to evolve. In part because of the relative newness of the law, scholarly analysis of stalking remains rare and confined primarily to clinical studies by psychologists and psychiatrists. But a pursuer’s interpersonal attention, a target’s reciprocation, and the evolution of these behaviours into patterns of stalking reflect systematic economic choices made by those agents. The economic model of stalking developed in this paper analyses the causes and consequences of these choices by considering interpersonal pursuit and reciprocation as a sequential game. The analysis allows us to understand stalking within the broader context of economic behaviours characterized by episodic interpersonal encounters, legal and otherwise, and facilitates economic explanations for several stylized patterns commonly observed in real stalking cases. Some of these carry relevance for policy and may serve as a foundation for future empirical study.