Tuesday, May 03, 2011

Is US$ 25 Million Enough to Catch a Terrorist?

While it is demonstrably true that the significant prizes money often leads solutions for policy questions, it has never occurred to me to question whether that is also true for law enforcement action. And with my stated bias most recently stated here towards prizes as a form of outsourcing solutions to business and public policy problems, I begun to think about why this confessed terror boss was not apprehended sooner. Is it possible that a US$ 25 million prize was an insufficient incentive for someone to cooperate with the US state Department?

Writing in Slate Magazine here, Annie Lowrie argues with herself on the same issue too by asking whether the US State Department will be giving out that money for any person who may have provided some information that enabled the planning and execution of that daring raid. As she concludes, there is a dearth of data available for independent testing of the hypothesis and yet officials claim that offering a bounty for fugitives works. Absent some public data and analysis, I am unsure that the US$ 25 million was the right amount because perhaps a fraction or a multiple of that amount would have gotten the same effect much sooner. Maybe so, maybe not.  

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