Fraud Cycles

38 Pages Posted: 19 Feb 2011 Last revised: 15 Feb 2014

See all articles by Jiong Gong

Jiong Gong

University of International Business and Economics (UIBE)

R. Preston McAfee

California Institute of Technology - Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences; Yahoo! - Yahoo! Research Labs

Michael A. Williams

Competition Economics LLC

Date Written: February 14, 2014

Abstract

Fraud is an ancient crime and one that annually causes hundreds of billions of dollars in losses. We develop an evolutionary theory that suggests cyclical behavior in frauds should be common. We perform a wavelet analysis of the frequencies of fraudulent and non-fraudulent offenses. Our results demonstrate that the frequencies of fraudulent offenses exhibit cyclical behavior that differs markedly from the cyclical behavior of non-fraudulent offenses.

Keywords: fraud, cycle, steady state, wavelet

JEL Classification: G38, L2, M49

Suggested Citation

Gong, Jiong and McAfee, Randolph Preston and McAfee, Randolph Preston and Williams, Michael A., Fraud Cycles (February 14, 2014). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1762583 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1762583

Jiong Gong (Contact Author)

University of International Business and Economics (UIBE) ( email )

10, Huixin Dongjie
Changyang District
Beijing, Beijing 100029
China

Randolph Preston McAfee

Yahoo! - Yahoo! Research Labs ( email )

Sunnyvale, CA 94089
United States

California Institute of Technology - Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences ( email )

1200 East California Blvd.
Pasadena, CA 91125
United States

Michael A. Williams

Competition Economics LLC ( email )

2000 Powell Street
Suite 510
Emeryville, CA 94608
United States

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