We study two- and three-body lepton flavor violating (LFV) decays involving leptons and neutral vector bosons V = rho(0), omega, phi, J/psi, Upsilon, Z(0), as well as pseudoscalar P = pi(0), eta, eta', eta(c) and scalar S = f(0)(500), f(0)(980), a(0)(980), chi(c0)(1P) mesons, without referring to a specific mechanism of LFV realization. In particular, we relate the rates of the three-body LFV decays tau(mu) -> 3l, where l = mu or e, to the two-body LFV decays (V, P) -> tau mu(tau e, mu e), where V and P play the role of intermediate resonances in the decay process tau(mu) -> 3l. From the experimental upper bounds for the branching ratios of tau(mu) -> 3l decays, we derive upper limits for the branching ratios of (V, P) -> tau mu(tau e, mu e). We compare our results to the available experimental data and known theoretical upper limits from previous studies of LFV processes and find that some of our limits are several orders of magnitude more stringent. Using the idea of quark-hadron duality, we extract limits on various quark-lepton dimension-six LFV operators from data on lepton decays. Some of these limits are either new or stronger than those existing in the literature.Regular 2015FONDECYTFONDECYT