Abstract
The field of covert and criminal network studies has been dubbed as "theoryless" by some indeed sound voices (Carrington, 2011; van der Hulst, 2011). The emergence of a large amount of empirical research has brought up a number of important findings, which challenge this claim.
One of the most (if not the most) frequently cited theses in this research area is the so-called efficiency/security trade-off postulated by Morselli, Giguére and Petit (2007). Present article aims to systematically review this thesis, or even a theory, subject it to a scrutiny and finally - put it to empirical test using exponential random graph models.