Moving Forward vs. Inflicting Costs in a Random-Walk Model of War

Keisuke Nakao

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: How do belligerents choose and change their military strategies during war? How do these strategies shape war? To address these questions, we develop a random-walk model of war, where two belligerents fight over "forts" across periods. The random walk represents a battlefront, which moves as the war evolves, resulting in the occupation of more forts for the winning side and less forts for the losing side. Unlike existing models, ours allows the belligerents to choose an action out of moving forward, inflicting costs, and surrender in every battle. We found that equilibrium strategies are monotonic with respect to the walk---a belligerent will punish its opponent if it is sufficiently advantageous and surrender if it is too disadvantageous. Accordingly, the punishment strategy can function to shorten the war. Moreover, a severer punishment tends to make the war even shorter.

Keywords: gambler's ruin; military strategy; random walk (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C73 D74 F51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/96071/1/MPRA_paper_96071.pdf original version (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:pra:mprapa:96071

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().