Terrorism is the premeditated, threatened or actual use of force or violence to attain a political goal through fear, coercion, or intimidation. By deliberately choosing victims at random, terrorists seek to create an atmosphere of fear, in which everyone feels at risk. The problem of terrorism shows no sign of abating. The U.S. Department of State recorded 477 transnational events in 1982; 485 in 1983; 598 in 1984; 785 in 1985; 774 in 1986; and 832 in 1987. During the first six months of 1988, 515 international events took place. The objective of this project is to use methodologies drawn from game theory, bargaining theory, and dynamic programming to analyze the plausibility and optimality of the never-to-negotiate strategy of precommitment, adopted by many modern-day governments to deal with hostage-taking terrorist incidents. The project also employs these techniques to identify successful negotiation strategies between sovereign governments when they seek to form terrorist-thwarting agreements. In addition, the project investigates the efficacy of pre-emptive and retaliatory strikes, frequently mentioned as an effective means for inhibiting terrorism. Interrupted time series analysis is applied to a 1968-1987 data set of terrorist incidents to examine the efficiency of retaliatory strikes, diplomatic agreements, and technological devices in curbing terrorism. Other empirical procedures, e..g, time-to-failure regressions, Tobit, logit, etc., are employed to study the determinants behind the resolution of a hostage-taking crisis. The project also analyzes the best government response when terrorists can choose the country to stage their incidents. In particular, the project examines the governments' choice of deterrence expenditures as well as other choice variables when the location of the attack is uncertain. This project should be supported because it develops new theoretical tools for studying terrorism and the empirical research should provide new evidence about the efficacy of different ways of dealing with terrorists.
