This paper makes two contributions to the literature on terrorism: 1) It presents a model that explains the cyclical characteristics of terrorist attacks, and 2) It improves on the existing theoretical cyclical models since it takes explicitly into account terrorists' motivations and decision-making. The model assumes that the government acts as leader and terrorists as followers. Terrorists maximize terrorist acts over time constrained by their budget constraint, which yields a time path for terrorist activities. Then the government maximizes national security by taking the time path of terrorist activities and investments in enforcement as constraints. The model shows that permanent cyclical paths for enforcement, terrorist activities, terrorist capital and national security may arise as an optimal solution.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.