Famous cultural monuments are often regarded as unique icons, making them an attractive target for terrorists. Despite huge military and police outlays, terrorist attacks on important monuments can hardly be avoided. We argue that an effective strategy for discouraging terrorist attacks on...

Present anti-terrorist policy concentrates almost exclusively on deterrence. It seeks to fend off terrorism by raising the cost of undertaking terrorist acts. This paper argues that deterrence policy is less effective than generally thought and induces in some cases even more terrorism. This is,...

This paper discusses a novel approach to elicit people’s preferences for public goods, namely the life satisfaction approach. Reported subjective well-being data are used to directly evaluate utility consequences of public goods. The strengths of this approach are compared to traditional...

The trends and consequences of terrorist activities are often captured by counting the number of incidents and casualties. More recently, the effects of terrorist acts on various aspects of the economy have been analyzed. These costs are surveyed and put in perspective. As economic consequences...

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...

Terrorism will be high on the political agenda for many years to come. Various policies are open to a government fighting terrorism but, in any case, considerable costs are involved. In the competition for political support, the costs and benefits of anti-terrorism policies will be debated....

Deterrence has been a crucial element in fighting terrorism, both in politics and in rational choice analyses of terrorism. However, there are two strategies that are superior to deterrence. The first one is to make terrorist attacks less devastating and less attractive to terrorists through...

Many studies have found a gap between willingness-to-pay and willingness-to-accept that is inconsistent with standard theory. There is also evidence that the gap is eroded by experience gained in the laboratory and naturally occurring markets. This paper argues that the gap and the effects of...

The results of a new experimental study reveal highly systematic violations of expected utility theory. The pattern of these violations is exactly the opposite of the classical common ratio effect discovered by Allais (1953). Two recent decision theories— stochastic expected utility theory...

It is still an open question when groups perform better than individuals in intellectual tasks. We report that in a company takeover experiment, groups placed better bids than individuals and substantially reduced the winner’s curse. This improvement was mostly due to peer pressure over the...