Terrorism, Counterterrorism and Optimal Striking Rules

Giovanni Immordino, Gülen Karakoç and Salvatore Piccolo ()

Revue économique, 2018, vol. 69, issue 6, 961-984

Abstract: We study a simple mechanism design problem that describes the optimal behavior of a country targeted by a foreign terrorist group. The country is uncertain about the terrorists? strength and may decide to acquire such information from the community hosting the terrorists. We highlight a novel trade-off between target hardening?i.e., mitigating the incidence of an attack by strengthening internal controls and improving citizens? protection?and preemptive military measures aimed at eradicating the problem at its root?i.e., a strike in the terrorists? hosting country. We show that, conditional on being informed about the terrorists? strength, the country engages in a preemptive attack only when it faces a sufficiently serious threat and when the community norms favoring terrorists are weak. Yet, in contrast with the existing literature, we show that it is optimal for the country to acquire information only when these norms are strong enough and when its prior information about the terrorists? strength is sufficiently poor.

Keywords: counter-terrorism; striking rules; target hardening; terrorism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cairn.info/load_pdf.php?ID_ARTICLE=RECO_696_0961 (application/pdf)
http://www.cairn.info/revue-economique-2018-6-page-961.htm (text/html)
free

Related works:
Working Paper: Terrorism, Counterterrorism and Optimal Striking Rules (2017)
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:cai:recosp:reco_696_0961

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Revue économique from Presses de Sciences-Po
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jean-Baptiste de Vathaire ().