The Supply Side Determinants of Territory and Conflict

Jordan Adamson and Erik Kimbrough

Working Papers from Chapman University, Economic Science Institute

Abstract: What determines the geographic extent of territory? We microfound and extend Boulding’s “Loss of Strength Gradient” to predict the extensive and intensive margins of conflict across space. We show how economies of scale in the production of violence and varying costs of projecting violence at a distance combine to affect the geographic distribution of conflict and territory. We test and probe the boundaries of this model in an experiment varying the fixed costs of conflict entry. As predicted, higher fixed costs increase the probability of exclusive territories; median behavior closely tracks equilibrium predictions in all treatments.

Keywords: conflict; territory; experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C9 D74 P48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:chu:wpaper:18-10

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