A bit too late, something relevant to the original topic. Quote about the revenge instinct, from the Peter Watts’s speech here, linked from here. The economics of revenge may be strongly relevant to the attacker’s behavior.
I have a sense of where we came from as a species, and I know that ethics and morality are not human traits; they're mammalian ones. Capuchins feel empathy. Chimps have a sense of fair play. Any number of social species have what you might call a justice instinct: a drive to punish cheaters and freeloaders.
Our own species is hardwired for revenge, to the point that we'll go out of our way to punish those who have trespassed against us, even if meting out that punishment costs us more than it costs our transgressor. We will cut off our noses to spite our faces. This holds right across the board from financial games in which people feel cheated out of small sums of money, all the way up to suicide bombers— who, despite what the public seems to think, are apparently not a bunch of ignorant wild-eyed religious zealots after all. They actually tend to be intelligent, well-educated, well-employed— even secular, sometimes. One characteristic they tend to share, though, is low self-esteem. A sense of humiliation, both personal and cultural. These people regard their own lives as so cheapened that they will actually gain value if traded in against higher-value targets. Net profit, in other words. Revenge economics.
But this isn't so much economics as simple brain-stem biology.
