Combating political hostage‐taking

Abstract

Rational actor models have examined the effects of increasing punishment or the probability of apprehension on terrorists activities including hostage‐taking. This paper attempts to introduce a policy tool in the form of a reward so as to examine the impact of a policy‐mix of penalties and rewards on the behavior of hostage‐takers. The results reached show that given hostage‐taking behavior and government cost, a policy‐mix of punishment and reward may have a greater impact on reducing hostage‐taking than any individual policy of pure punitive actions or pure reward. The penalty‐reward combination is likely to be Pareto superior to a policy depending completely on punitive actions.