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Social judgment theory (SJT) is a method for eliciting opinions about the relative importance of multiple objectives or attributes. When SJT is used to elicit the opinions of individuals who form a group, one must consider by what method these individual opinions can be aggregated to represent the group's opinion. This article suggests a functional form for analyzing opinions elicited by SJT and a method for combining individual opinions. It then applies the proposed model to the problem of establishing relative weights for six performance dimensions for a public sector agency. Analysis of data for individuals in two groups indicates that both interaction and quadratic terms are important in describing how individuals evaluate agency performance. Further, individ ual methods of agency evaluation are so diverse that a random coefficient model of valuation for the group as a whole is more appropriate than the traditional fixed coefficient model.

In this article, we develop a model of the length of time until recidivism, and estimate it on a sample of releasees from the North Carolina prison system. Evidence of the model's predictive accuracy is presented. The model is then used to evaluate a correctional program by comparing the actual time until recidivism of program participants to that predicted by the model. The program appears to be effective only in the very short run.

An Economic Analysis of Crime and Justice: Theory, Methods, and Applications presents the applications of economic theory and econometric methods to various problems in criminology. The book is divided into three parts. Part I discusses models of criminal recidivism. The second part tackles the economic model of crime. Part III estimates cost functions for prisons. Specific chapters in the book cover topics on statistical analysis of qualitative outcomes; analysis of two measures of criminal activity: the arrest rate and the conviction rate; and long-run estimate of cost function for a group o

We review the argumentsfor and against randomized field experiments design to address important questions of social policy. Based on this review, we make a number of recommendations about how the use of randomized field experiments might be fostered.