The individual approach seeks to relate certainty, severity, and crime benefits to the decisionmaking of individual would-be criminals as to whether it would be profitable to commit a certain crime under various circumstances. The societal approach seeks to generalize about the relations between certainty, severity, and crime benefits to crime occurrence across cities, States, nations, or other governing units. The paper illustrates that the individual approach can be more easily modeled mathematically than the societal perspective by using only deductive analysis. The societal view involves empirical data, which are difficult to obtain, and statistical controls that are difficult to implement. The benefit of crime to the would-be criminal is an important additional consideration in explaining both the degree of crime occurrence and the reason why a would-be criminal chooses to commit a criminal act rather than to refrain from doing so. For this reason, the analysis of tradeoffs included three dimensions -- certainty, severity, and crime benefits. Charts, graphs, and 24 footnotes are provided. (Author abstract modified)