Reason and War

Abstract

A new specification of the expected utility model of international conflict places expected utilities within a polar coordinate system; treats third-party choices in a manner more consistent with classical forms; estimates the expected utilities derived from not challenging existing policies; more fully represents the expected costs of conflict; and normalizes expected utilities regardless of system size. By assuming that the probability of escalation of a dispute increases monotonically with leaders' expectations of gain, we derive continuous functions for the probabilities of war, intervention, violence, and peace. The revised theory significantly improves our ability to discriminate between violent and nonviolent disputes and between violent disputes that escalated to warfare and those that did not in Europe between 1816 and 1970.

Equilibrium Behavior in Crisis Bargaining Games

“…QED Thus, given the environment outlined in section 2, for any game form (D 1 , D2 , G) and any equilibrium (<T1 , <T2 ) of the resulting Bayesian game, the probability of war gw(<T1 (t), <T2 ) is weakly increasing in t (i.e., in equilibrium the probability of war is an increasing function of player l's expected benefits from war). This justifies the assumption in the expected utility models of Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman (1986) and Lalman (1988) that a decision maker with a higher expected benefit from war will be more likely to go to war; indeed Lemma 1 shows this to be the only assumption consistent with rational behavior in an incomplete information environment. 6 It also shows how the presence of such monotonicity in the equilibria analyzed by Morrow (1989) is not an artifact of the particular game form assumed nor an artifact of any selection from among the set of Bayesian equilibria in the game.…”

A Comparison of Models for Interstate Wars and for Individual Violence

“…In the last few decades, there have been extensive efforts to apply rational choice theory to understand war onsets between nation-states (Bremer & Cusack, 1995;Bueno de Mesquita, 1981;Bueno de Mesquita & Lalman, 1986). ''The choice of war or peace depends on the choices of individuals .…”

The fetishisation of falsification: The debate on rational choice

“…To cite one important example, Bueno de Mesquita's expected utility models of the decision to go to war are clearly formulated, have been subjected to rigorous statistical testing, and provide important insights. 13 Taylor argues that US domestic politics is a relatively hostile environment for rational choice. It is not like simpler political systems where the numbers of well defined, feasible courses of action are small, with major consequences for life chances hanging on choices, and opportunities for learning available because of the relatively slow pace of change.…”