When to Appease and When to Punish: Hitler, Putin, and Hamas
Journal: National Bureau of Economic Research
Year: 2024

Much has been written about deterrence, the process of committing to punish an adversary to prevent an attack.But in sufficiently rich environments where attacks evolve over time, formulating a strategy involves not only deterrence but also appeasement, the less costly process of not responding to an attack.This paper develops a model that integrates these two processes to analyze the equilibrium time paths of attacks, punishment, and appeasement.We study an environment in which a small attack i