When Terrorists Compete: The Marketplace for Violence.

This paper expands upon Bloom's (2005) outbidding theory by introducing economic and business strategy analysis techniques to the study of competition between terrorist groups. This literature provides a more nuanced conceptualization of competition that goes beyond just the market structure defined in terms of the number of active players. This paper develops the argument that there is a marketplace where terrorists win political and/or material support in exchange for their production of violence. The size of the demand for terrorist violence, barriers to entry, production costs, and level of competition within the market all work together to determine the violent behavior of each terror group. The initial test of this model is a large-N statistical analysis that draws on data from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD1) and the Minorities at Risk Project (MAR). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]