Individual preferences and the demand for military expenditure*

Whose preferences determine the tradeoff between security and civilian output in deciding upon budget allocations to defence? This paper considers the role that consumer preferences might play in influencing military spending. We propose normative criteria to judge the economic or political efficiency of defence provision at a given time, and test them using Australian survey‐based micro‐data. Our results suggest that the political system has not delivered a simple social‐choice translation of individual preferences into collective outcomes, nor has it delivered results consistent with simple majority‐voting median preferences.     

Netwar Revisited: The Fight for the Future Continues

This work continues to develop the 'netwar' concept that the authors introduced in 1993 and have expanded upon in their various RAND and other writings ever since. Deeper understanding of the nature, strengths and vulnerabilities of networks will prove useful in combating terrorism and transnational crime, but also in understanding militant social activism, both of the violently disruptive sort and that which aims at fostering the rise of a global civil society. This essay also assesses recent US performance in the terror war, and concludes by raising concerns over the possible rise of a new form of network-based fascism.     

Inventory models of future supply uncertainty with single and multiple suppliers

We consider order-quantity/reorder-point inventory models where the availability of supply is subject to random fluctuations. We use concepts from renewal reward processes to develop average cost objective function models for single, two, and multiple suppliers. Identifying the regenerative cycle for each problem aids the development of the cost function. In the case of two suppliers, spectral theory is used to derive explicit expressions for the transient probabilities of a four-state continuous-time Markov chain representing the status of the system. These probabilities are used to compute the exact form of the average cost expression. For the multiple-supplier problem, assuming that all the suppliers have similar availability characteristics, we develop a simple model and show that as the number of suppliers becomes large, the model reduces to the classical EOQ model. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.