Conflict prevention by Bayesian persuasion

Abstract

Drawing upon the Bayesian persuasion literature, I show that a mediator can provide conflicting parties strategically with information to decrease the ex-ante war probability. In a conflict between two parties with private information about military strength, the mediator generates information about each conflicting party's strength and commits to sharing the obtained information with the respective opponent. The conflicting parties can be convinced not to fight each other. The conflicting parties benefit from mediation, as the ex-ante war probability is reduced. The benefit is taken up by weak conflicting parties. This benefit is larger when war is costlier and when the war probability absent mediation is higher. | INTRODUCTIONUnderstanding conflict resolution and prevention is a central concern of international relations. Mediation is one of the most widely used techniques in international crises management. Mediation occurred in 37 out of the 84 conflicts registered by the International Crisis Behaviour Project in the period from 1990 to 2015. For 27 out of these 37 cases, mediation was named as either an "important" or the "most important" factor for easing tensions (see Brecher & Wilkenfeld, 1997;Brecher et al., 2017). This paper contributes to the theoretical understanding of effective mediation by showing how a mediator can use research and intelligence to reduce the ex-ante war probability. Specifically, a mediator can convince conflicting parties not to fight each other by strategically providing them information about their respective opponent.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

Information design, externalities, and government interventions

“…Our paper is also closely related to the literature on Bayesian persuasion (Kamenica & Gentzkow, 2011). Scholars have used the models of information design and strategic information transmission to consider various real world problems, including stress tests in the financial sector (Goldstein & Leitner, 2018), grading policy (Boleslavsky & Cotton, 2015), law enforcement strategy (Hernandez & Neeman, 2022), lobbying (Li, 2017(Li, , 2020, certification (Garrido et al, 2020), and conflict prevention (Hennigs, 2021). 2 Recently, scholars have considered Bayesian persuasion models in which the receiver's actions have spillover effects.…”

Persuading sincere and strategic voters

“…Gitmez and Molavi (2022) consider media bias in the context of Bayesian persuasion, where a biased sender is trying to persuade receivers who have heterogeneous preferences and beliefs, and show that the sender becomes less biased as society becomes more polarized. In a slightly different context, Hennigs (2021) also considers heterogeneous receivers who have private information about their types and shows that employing uncorrelated messages is optimal. In contrast, we show that the sender is better off employing correlated messages.…”

Opacity in bargaining over public good provision

“…Bayesian persuasion as introduced by Kamenica and Gentzkow ( 2011) is an important subclass of such problems. Recent contributions include Hennings (2021) and Li and Xiao (2023).…”