Journal Articles

Social Stability and Catastrophe Risk: Lessons From the Stag Hunt

---

Had the destruction and suffering visited upon New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina been the result of a terrorist attack, it would have been very successful — not because of the number of innocent lives lost or amount of property destroyed, but rather because of the breakdown of the social order. What better possible outcome could a terrorist envision than planting seeds of doubt regarding the willingness and ability of individuals and government to fulfill their respective roles in the `social contract'? In this article, we employ a class of symmetric, ordinal 2 x 2 games — including the frequently studied Prisoner's Dilemma, Chicken, and Stag Hunt — to model the stability of the social contract in the face of catastrophic changes in social relations. In two alternative analyses, we find that the Stag Hunt provides a relatively stable and efficient normative model for society. These results offer useful insights into the pre- and post-event management of catastrophe risks, especially large-scale terrorist attacks designed to disrupt the social order

---

Availability

No copy data

Detail Information

Series Title

Journal of Theoretical Politics

Call Number

-

Publisher

London : Sage Publications., 2008

Collation

-

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

0951-6298

Classification

-

Content Type

-

Media Type

-

Carrier Type

-

Edition

Vol. 20, No. 4, July 2008. Page 477-497

Subject(s)

Terrorism
Catastrophe Risk
Social Contract
Stag Hunt
Social Stability and Catastrophe Risk

Specific Detail Info

-

Statement of Responsibility

-

Other version/related

File Attachment

Comments

---

You must be logged in to post a comment