The Attack-and-Defense Conflict with the Gun-and- Butter Dilemma

Subhasish Chowdhury and Iryna Topolyan ()
Additional contact information
Iryna Topolyan: Department of Economics, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221, USA

No 2024003, Working Papers from The University of Sheffield, Department of Economics

Abstract: We analyze a general equilibrium model of attack and defense with production and conflict. One attacker and one defender allocate their fixed endowments either to produce gun or to produce butter, and the volume of guns produced determines the winner in the conflict. If the attacker wins, then it appropriates all the butter produced in the economy; otherwise, each consume only their own butter. We characterize the unique interior and unique corner equilibrium for this game. We find that (i) the defender may spend more resources on conflict than the attacker even without loss aversion or other behavioral biases, (ii) the attacker may expend all their resources only in conflict, and (iii) the interior and the corner equilibria cannot coexist.

Keywords: Conflict; Production; Gun and Butter; Attack and Defense (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D23 D74 Q34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2024-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/economics/research/serps First version, June 2024 (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:shf:wpaper:2024003

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from The University of Sheffield, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mike Crabtree ().