Optimal Interventions When Illicit Trafficking Responds

ABSTRACT The capabilities of illicit trafficking organizations to expand or contract their periphery and source segments by modifying their link structures pose challenges to law enforcement. This paper scrutinizes the structural response of illicit trafficking organizations to intervention strategies. It also studies how the law enforcement authority should allocate its resources between the source and the periphery segments, given the structural response of trafficking, to minimize the expected harms. The analysis shows that traffickers integrate the supply, possibly build redundant sources and expand in peripheral markets if the source segment is targeted (decapitation), maintain near‐maximal expansion by splintering into supply cells or thin subnetworks if the periphery is targeted (amputation). This response subverts law enforcement primarily by suppressing the possibility of trace‐back detection of trafficking units through their detected connections. In the transnational trafficking context, it can also stifle intelligence sharing between nations. The optimal intervention, then, is amputation under intermediate budgets and large source fragmentation costs, decapitation under low detection contiguity. Actual policies that prioritize border protection and port‐of‐entry units can be optimal from national, but not global, perspective.