When to Attack an Oppressive Government?

Natasa Bilkic and Thomas Gries

VfS Annual Conference 2012 (Goettingen): New Approaches and Challenges for the Labor Market of the 21st Century from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: Initiating a conflict is an investment in social, political or economic change. The decision to attack is sequential in time, irreversible and, more important, includes highly uncertain and erratic threats and opportunities yet completely disregarded in confict theory. In this dynamic model of decision making we focus on the time dimension of an escalating conflict. In order to cover the effects of high uncertainties we extend methods in real option theory by introducing a discontinuous Ito-L vy Jump Diffusion processes. We analytically derive a threshold that triggers the attack and determine the expected time of action. With this new discontinuous processs we are able to show that an increasing number and intensity of oppressive government actions may lead to an earlier outbreak of conflict. However, even if latent conflicts are not immediately solved policies can prolong the peace period to find a long term solution to the conflict.

JEL-codes: C61 D74 D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo, nep-mic and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/62031/1/VfS_2012_pid_427.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:vfsc12:62031

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in VfS Annual Conference 2012 (Goettingen): New Approaches and Challenges for the Labor Market of the 21st Century from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().