IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/defpea/v36y2025i7p960-974.html

Arms Spending and War Casualties: Understanding the Strategic Trade-Offs in Warfare

Author

Listed:
  • Kerim Keskin

Abstract

This paper formulates an armed conflict as a game-theoretic model, and relying on the empirical evidence that war casualties are costly for governments due to loss of public support, it investigates the strategic trade-off between arms spending and casualty costs. By characterizing the unique Nash equilibrium in our conflict model, we offer insights into how each side acts in equilibrium when one side’s war efforts are more destructive, or its citizens are more sensitive to casualties, or both. Emphasizing the pivotal role of public sentiment in shaping government actions during armed conflicts, our results reveal how disadvantageous it can be to incur relatively higher costs from war casualties in terms of winning probabilities in equilibrium.

Suggested Citation

  • Kerim Keskin, 2025. "Arms Spending and War Casualties: Understanding the Strategic Trade-Offs in Warfare," Defence and Peace Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 36(7), pages 960-974, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:defpea:v:36:y:2025:i:7:p:960-974
    DOI: 10.1080/10242694.2024.2420992
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/10242694.2024.2420992
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/10242694.2024.2420992?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:defpea:v:36:y:2025:i:7:p:960-974. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/GDPE20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.