1.People choose to offend using the same cost-benefit analysis they use when choosing legal behaviors: a decision to offend reflects a normal, rational, calculation. Thus, this explanation of crime does not need to introduce personality characteristics, background experiences, or situational contingencies.
2.The decision to offend involves calculations based on estimates of a legal opportunity's availability, costs, and ability to provide a desired end (i.e., expected utility), versus an illegal opportunity's availability, costs, and ability to provide the same or comparable end. Both legal and illegal behaviors can provide an array of benefits that include material gain, approval or prestige, "psychic" or emotional returns (e.g., thrill, honor, revenge, a sense of equity), and other nonpecuniary returns. The potential costs of these behaviors include time, transaction, and "psychic" costs (e.g., anxiety). Crime, however, introduces a unique set of reputational (e.g., loss of respect), psychological (e.g., guilt, shame, anxiety) and punishment costs (e.g., fines and incarceration).
3.The decision to offend is also influenced by a person's tolerance or enjoyment of taking risks. Thus, all things equal, those who commit crime at relatively high rates are comparatively more risk seeking or risk tolerant, those who offend at moderate rates are relatively more risk neutral, and those who seldom, if ever, violate criminal laws are relatively more risk averse.
4.The most effective way to reduce crime is to increase people's perceptions that costs of offending will exceed its rewards, and that the benefits of legal behavior surpass its costs.