Kleptomania is an impulse control disorder characterized by the irresistible urge to steal not for monetary gain. Since its conceptualization, this categorical diagnosis has been conflated with common beliefs regarding the social class and gender such as the idea that women are intrinsically fragile and that people in the middle class were unlikely to commit theft. Also, its use has been controversial in the medical and forensic fields. This presentation will provide a historical excursus through the definitions of the syndrome and summarize the available pharmacological and psychotherapeutic options for its treatment. Currently, there is a lack of systematic studies regarding the clinical characteristics of kleptomania and its treatment options for practical standardized approaches.

In all legal systems, possession and property are inextricably linked. Game theory captures this relationship in the Hawk–Dove game: players competing for an asset are better off when the possessor plays Hawk and the intruder plays Dove (the bourgeois strategy) so that property can emerge as a spontaneous convention. This theory has been supported by large experimental evidence with animals. This paper presents a lab experiment where possession is manipulated to study the emergence of the property convention with human subjects. We show that the highest coordination emerges when possession is achieved meritoriously and that possession induces only bourgeois coordination (never antibourgeois).

We introduce a game theoretical model of stealing interactions. We model the situation asan extensive form game when one individual may attempt to steal a valuable item fromanother who may in turn defend it. The population is not homogeneous, but rather eachindividual has a different Resource Holding Potential (RHP). We assume that RHP not onlyinfluences the outcome of the potential aggressive contest (the individual with the largerRHP is more likely to win), but that it also influences how an individual values aparticular resource. We investigate several valuation scenarios and study the prevalenceof aggressive behaviour. We conclude that the relationship between RHP and resource valueis crucial, where some cases lead to fights predominantly between pairs of strongindividuals, and some between pairs of weak individuals. Other cases lead to no fightswith one individual conceding, and the order of strategy selection is crucial, where theindividual which picks its strategy first often has an advantage.