Kings and Vikings: On the Dynamics of Competitive Agglomeration

Matthew Baker and Erwin Bulte

Departmental Working Papers from United States Naval Academy Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper studies the Viking age – the roughly 300 year period beginning in 800 AD – from the perspective of the economics of conflict. The Viking age is interesting because throughout the time period, the scale of conflict increased – small scale raiding behaviour eventually evolved into large scale clashes between armies. With this observation in mind, we present a theoretical model describing the incentives both the defending population and the invading population had to agglomerate into larger groups to better defend against attacks, and engage in attacks, respectively. The result is what might be called a theory of competitive agglomeration. We also apply our model in assessing the factors behind the onset of Vikings raids at the end of the 8th century.

Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2005-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.usna.edu/EconDept/RePEc/usn/wp/usnawp11.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.usna.edu:80 (A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.)

Related works:
Journal Article: Kings and Vikings: on the dynamics of competitive agglomeration (2010)
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:usn:usnawp:11

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Departmental Working Papers from United States Naval Academy Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().