Cybercrime Is Not Always Rational, but It Is Reasonable

Abstract

A challenge for researchers and law enforcement has been understanding criminal activities that are adaptive, resilient and well motivated but not 'organised' in a routine sense (Raab and Milward 2003). A powerful explanation examines their economic logic as sophisticated, rationally governed operations with business-like structures and functions that leverage adaptive network qualities (Kraemer-Mbula et al. 2013;Kshetri 2010;Yip et al. 2012). However, there tends to be an elision between 'markets' and 'economic rationality' as if the two are co-produced. Markets in neoclassical theory are theorised as pure rational exchange when they are in fact institutionalised, culturally located, socially embedded structures (Beckert 2009;Fligstein 2002). In order to function markets do not need rationality, in the sense of calculable judgements that respond to price/cost signals, and do not necessarily breed it either (Beckert and Dewey 2017).In terms of how we theorise illicit markets, criminology has increasingly recognised the many ways that dynamics of criminal economic entities are shaped by market relationships such as supply/demand relationships and economic opportunity structures (Becker 1968;Reuter 1983