Title
Optimal enlistment age: A cost-benefit analysis and some simulations
Abstract
Enlistment at the earliest viable age maximizes the country’s wartime army size and thereby the country’s attack-deterrence capacity. Injuries and death generate a loss of quantity and quality of life that reduces the benefit from early-age enlistment. The benefit from any age of recruitment is also affected by the rise and decline of the individual’s military performance and civilian productivity and by the changes in the individual’s adjustment costs over his lifecycle. The simulations of an optimization model incorporating these cost and benefit elements suggest that if the intensity of the rise and decline of the individual’s military performance is sufficiently larger than the intensity of the rise and decline of his civilian productivity, there exists an interior optimal enlistment age that is greater than the commonly practiced 18. In such a case, most of the simulation results are closely scattered around 21 despite large parameter changes.
Year
DOI
Venue
2007
10.1016/j.ejor.2006.01.047
European Journal of Operational Research
Keywords
Field
DocType
Economics,Enlistment age,Risk,Cost–benefit analysis,Decision rule
Decision rule,Cost–benefit analysis,Operations management,Mathematics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
180
1
0377-2217
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.36
0
Authors
1
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Amnon Levy111.04