The lone wolf suicide terrorist: a preliminary application of mean-variance methods

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the insights that might be generated into the nature of 'lone wolf suicide terrorism' through the application of mean-variance analysis. Orthodox approaches to the analysis of terrorism, particularly (standard) expected utility analysis and game theoretical analysis, may need to be extended or complemented with new approaches in order to generate analytical insights into lone wolf suicide terrorism. One such approach is mean-variance analysis. Commonly deployed in financial economics, mean-variance preference orderings with quadratic utility can be applied even when the mean expected return and variance are infinite. This fact might potentially be exploited to analyse, from an economic perspective, the behaviour of the lone wolf suicide terrorist for which success might be reasonably considered to generate an infinite expected return