ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a valuable overview of concepts and findings from behavioral decision theory and of their applicability to an understanding of criminal decision making. The decision to commit a crime is the first behavior of direct relevance to the functioning of the criminal justice system. The idea that human information-processing limitations place constraints on decision processes is referred to as the concept of bounded rationality. The human decision maker is a limited information processor who has many different simplifying strategies for making choices. The expected utility model has been used to predict and explain decisions in a wide variety of domains ranging from decisions about births to national security policies. Adoption of the expected utility model for offender decisions has a number of important implications for the criminal justice system. A central tenet of information-processing theory is that the internal representations constructed by the decision maker drive behaviors such as choice and problem solving.
