Chowdhury, S.M. orcid.org/0000-0002-8386-9144 and Topolyan, I. (2025) The attack-and-defense conflict with the gun-and-butter dilemma. Economic Inquiry. ISSN: 0095-2583
Abstract
We analyze a general equilibrium model of attack and defense with production. One attacker and one defender allocate fixed endowments between producing butter and guns. We characterize the unique interior and unique corner equilibrium, and find that (i) the defenders may spend more resources on conflict than the attacker even without loss aversion or other preferential bias, (ii) the attackers may expend all their resources only in conflict, and (iii) the interior and the corner equilibria cannot coexist. These results may help explain Ukraine's sustained high defense effort and Russia's militarized economy, or the excessive conflict expenditure by Hamas etc.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Authors/Creators: |
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| Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2025 The Author(s). Economic Inquiry published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Western Economic Association International. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | Conflict; Contest; Production; Gun and Butter; Attack and Defense |
| Dates: |
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| Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
| Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Economics (Sheffield) |
| Date Deposited: | 03 Oct 2025 12:11 |
| Last Modified: | 16 Oct 2025 14:15 |
| Status: | Published online |
| Publisher: | Wiley |
| Refereed: | Yes |
| Identification Number: | 10.1111/ecin.70020 |
| Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:232411 |

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