Wars of Conquest and Independence

Friedhelm Hentschel (), Roland Hodler and Hadi Yektas

No 1516, Economics Working Paper Series from University of St. Gallen, School of Economics and Political Science

Abstract: Wars of conquest and wars of independence are characterized by an asymmetry in the payoff structure: The production of one party constitutes the winner's prize, while the production of the other party is not contested. We present and solve a model of warfare, which nests this asymmetric payoff structure as well as the standard symmetric payoff structure where the winner gets aggregate production. We use this model to discuss how equilibrium behavior and outcomes depend on resource endowments and military and production technologies in asymmetric wars; and to compare equilibrium behavior and outcomes in symmetric and asymmetric wars. Among others, we find that asymmetric wars are fought less intensively, and that defending countries in wars of conquest and secessionist groups in wars of independence have higher winning probabilities in such asymmetric wars than they would have in standard symmetric wars.

Keywords: Conflict; war; asymmetric contests (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D74 H56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2015-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://ux-tauri.unisg.ch/RePEc/usg/econwp/EWP-1516.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Wars of Conquest and Independence (2019)
Working Paper: Wars of Conquest and Independence (2013)
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:usg:econwp:2015:16

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Paper Series from University of St. Gallen, School of Economics and Political Science Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().