Avoiding an Intimate Crime

Abstract

This chapter analyses the mechanisms employed by wealthy people to navigate the risk of kidnapping when hiring employees for their family homes. It shows how employers screen for different properties such as discretion and how they use vertical integration as a way to lower the cost and risk of hiring. The focus is specifically on the hiring process of drivers for the household. This is based on the fact that many kidnappings are orchestrated by someone close to the victim. The hiring process is seen as a problem of trust, and—following Spence—is solved through a signaling game, where employers look for hard-to-fake signals.