How to Fight Terrorism: Alternatives to Deterrence

Bruno Frey and Simon Luechinger

No 137, IEW - Working Papers from Institute for Empirical Research in Economics - University of Zurich

Abstract: Deterrence has been a crucial element in fighting terrorism, both in actual politics and rational choice analyses of terrorism. But there are superior strategies to deterrence. One is to make terrorist attacks less attractive. Another to raise the opportunity cost � rather than the material cost � to terrorists. These alternative strategies effectively dissuade potential terrorists. The strategies suggested here build on the �benevolence� system and tend to produce a positive sum game among the interacting parties. In contrast, the deterrence system is based on �threats� and tends to produce a negative sum game interaction.

Keywords: Terrorism; Deterrence; Decentralisation; Opportunity Cost; Rational Choice; Motivation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D74 H56 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law, nep-mic and nep-pbe
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (107)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/52035/1/iewwp137.pdf (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:zur:iewwpx:137

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IEW - Working Papers from Institute for Empirical Research in Economics - University of Zurich
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Severin Oswald ().