No abstract

2016-12-23T18:52:10

Much of the existing formal work on war models the decision to go to war as a game-ending, costly lottery. This article relaxes this assumption by treating war as a costly process during which the states run the risk of military collapse. The model also allows for uncertainty over either the cost of fighting or the distribution of power. The analysis makes four contributions to the growing costly-process literature: (i) the present model provides a more general treatment of the learning process that occurs when states are uncertain about the distribution of power, (ii) it explicitly compares the bargaining and learning processes for the two different sources of uncertainty, (iii) it suggests a way to empirically distinguish wars arising from these two sources, and (iv) it shows that the equilibrium dynamics of informational accounts of war may be quite sensitive to the underlying bargaining environment through which information is conveyed.

R ecent work across a wide range of issues in political economy as well as in American, comparative, and international politics tries to explain the inefficient use of power-revolutions, civil wars, high levels of public debt, international conflict, and costly policy insulation-in terms of commitment problems. This paper shows that a common mechanism is at work in a number of these diverse studies. This common mechanism provides a more general formulation of a type of commitment problem that can arise in many different substantive settings. The present analysis then formalizes this mechanism as an "inefficiency condition" that ensures that all of the equilibria of a stochastic game are inefficient. This condition has a natural substantive interpretation: Large, rapid changes in the actors' relative power (measured in terms of their minmax payoffs) may cause inefficiency.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. he problem of absolute and relative gains divides neoliberal institutionalism and structural realism. The former assumes states focus primarily on their absolute gains and emphasizes the prospects for cooperation. The latter supposes states are largely concerned with relative gains and emphasizes the prospects for conflict. Existing work in international relations theory generally traces the differences between these two theories to different assumptions about states' preferences. Using a simple game-theoretic model, this essay offers a reformulation of the problem of absolute and relative gains that links changes in the states' behavior, the feasibility of cooperation, and especially the states' concern for relative versus absolute gains explicitly to changes in the constraints facing the states. Many of the differences between neoliberal institutionalism and structural realism appear as special cases of the model.

A state in the international system implicit in realism must allocate its limited resources between satisfying its intrinsically valued ends and the means of military power. I formalize this guns-versus-butter problem in a simple infinite-horizon model in which two states must continually decide how to allocate their resources and whether to attack the other state. The analysis establishes sufficient conditions to ensure the existence of an equilibrium in which neither state attacks; shows that there is a strictly Pareto-dominant pair of peaceful equilibrium payoffs; characterizes the unique, peaceful Markov perfect equilibrium that yields them; and describes the comparative statics of the equilibrium allocations. More broadly, the analysis also suggests that the notion of anarchy has little if any substantive significance distinctively related to international politics and that the problem of absolute and relative gains is superfluous.

This paper develops a framework for analyzing a defender's allocation of scarce resources against a strategic adversary like a terrorist group in four settings: (1) a baseline case in which the sites the defender tries to guard are “independent” in that resources dedicated to protecting one site have no effect on any other site; (2) if the defender can also allocate resources to border defense, intelligence, or counterterrorist operations which, if successful, protect all of the sites; (3) if threats have strategic and nonstrategic components (e.g., the threat to public health from bioterror attacks and the natural outbreak of new diseases); and (4) if the defender is unsure of the terrorists' preferred targets. The analysis characterizes the defender's optimal (equilibrium) allocations in these settings, an algorithm or approach to finding the optimal allocations, and relevant comparative statics. These characterizations provide a general way of thinking about the resource-allocation problem in these settings.

Duration of the post-reinforcement pause was measured for three pigeons on fixed-ratio schedules of reinforcement ranging from 10 to 160. Small sequential changes were made in the ratio values without disrupting stable performance. The post-reinforcement pause increased consistently for all birds within three sessions as the ratio requirement increased. A frequency analysis of the individual pauses at selected fixed ratios revealed an increase in dispersion for all animals as the ratio size increased. Response rate tended to decrease for two of the birds and remained relatively stable for the third; but there were many reversals in these data.The data of Ferster and Skinner (1957) suggest that the post-reinforcement pause increases as the size of the fixed-ratio schedule of reinforcement (FR) is increased. A number of other studies (Kaplan, 1956;Premack, Schaeffer, and Hundt, 1964; Thompson, 1964;Winograd, 1965;Mintz, Mourer, and Gofseyeff, 1967;Felton and Lyon, 1966) METHOD SubjectsThree White Carneaux pigeons were maintained within 10 g of 80% of their free-feeding weight. One (P42) was experimentally naive, the other two (P33, P44) had previous FR training. Water and grit were available at all times in the home cages. ApparatusA Lehigh Valley pigeon test chamber Model 1519C was employed. A grain mixture of 50% kafir, 40% vetch, and 10% hemp was used for reinforcement. A reinforcement time, which ranged from 2 to 3 sec, was empirically determined for each subject so that the animal's weight was maintained within the prescribed limits. During reinforcement the white key light was turned off.The fixed-ratio reinforcement schedule was programmed by a Grason-Stadler ratio counter. The elapsed time from the end of the reinforcement period to the first response in the ratio run, i.e., the post-reinforcement pause, was measured in fourths of a second. This was done by recording the pulses (4 pps) from a Foringer electronic timer which were initiated by the end of the grain hopper cycle and terminated by the animal's first response. These pulses were recorded cumulatively over each daily session on a digital counter; the 89 1968, 11,[589][590][591][592][593] NUMBER 5 (SEPTEMBER)