External Subsidies and Lasting Peace

Journal of Theoretical Politics

2017

Studies of bargaining and war generally focus on two sources of incomplete information: uncertainty over the probability of victory and uncertainty over the costs of fighting. We introduce uncertainty over preferences of a spatial policy and argue for its relevance in crisis bargaining. Under these conditions, standard results from the bargaining model of war break down: peace can be Pareto inefficient and it may be impossible to avoid war. We then extend the model to allow for cheap talk pre-play communication. Whereas incentives to misrepresent normally render cheap talk irrelevant, here communication can cause peace and ensure that agreements are efficient. Moreover, peace can become more likely as (1) the variance in the proposer’s belief about its opponent’s type increases and (2) the costs of war decrease. Our results indicate that one major purpose of diplomacy is simply to communicate preferences and that such communications can be credible.

Section: Empirical Implications: Uncertainty Costs Of War and Thmentioning

confidence: 99%

Policy bargaining and militarized conflict

Bils

Journal of Theoretical Politics

2017

“…Consider situations where the uncertainty over p stems from one side not knowing the quantity of the other’s military allotments. For example, Arena and Pechenkina (2016) model a game in which the probability of victory is a function of a standard ratio contest function, but State A does not know whether State B has m true¯ B > 0 resources or m true¯ B > m true¯ B resources. 7 I speak to this source of uncertainty.…”

Section: The Mechanismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Power transfers, military uncertainty, and war

Journal of Theoretical Politics

2020

In many contexts, patrons wish to simultaneously increase a protégé’s military power while reducing the probability of war between that protégé and its enemy. Are these goals compatible? I show that the answer is yes when states face uncertainty over a class of military allotments. Arms transfers mitigate the information problem by making both strong and weak types behave more similarly. This encourages uninformed states to make safer demands, which decreases the probability of war. As a result, transfers to the informed actor both increase bargaining power and enhance efficiency under these conditions.

“…Costly signaling models (Arena 2013;Tarar 2013) have variable power and cost but differ on two fronts. First, those investments are sunk costs and therefore do not have an effect on crisis bargaining beyond the signal they send and the shift in the balance of power.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Endogenous military strategy and crisis bargaining

Conflict Management and Peace Science

İdrisoğlu

2023

When states fight wars, they choose between multiple military strategies, e.g. whether to place boots on the ground or restrict efforts to an air campaign. We modify the standard crisis bargaining model to account for this by endogenizing a state's war strategy. Intuitively, states choose the more powerful strategy when the additional strength gained covers the additional costs of doing so. However, there is a counterintuitive second-order consequence of this. When stronger campaigns are expensive but still credible, states are more likely to reach a negotiated settlement to avoid the corresponding high costs. As the cost of the more powerful option increases, states substitute their actions with cheaper but weaker alternatives. Because of these lower costs, states become less likely to reach a settlement. In some cases, both parties may be worse off as a result.