When Fully Informed States Make Good the Threat of War: Rational Escalation and the Failure of Bargaining (original) (raw)
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Conflict Management and Peace Science, 2006
We propose that fully informed rivals' ability to bargain on the terms of an alternative status quo can lead to the failure of asymmetric deterrence. The model we develop to support this claim allows repeated rounds of bargaining, crisis, and war until one of the rivals agrees to the other side's last offer. The defender holds and enjoys possession of the prize coveted by the challenger. We argue that the defender's incentive to drag his feet and the challenger's resulting need to resort to threats if she is to obtain anything at all, yield inefficient equilibria that involve costly wars. Credibility requires that the rivals make good on their deterrent threats of war with some probability, and this probability depends on the two sides respective bargaining positions. We therefore identify a tradeoff between bargaining and deterrence that leave the rivals indifferent between a whole continuum of possible inefficient equilibria. However, we distinguish between the ex ante expected utility calculations on which the rivals make forward looking, optimal, decisions and the evaluation of the ex post consequences of these choices. The ex post evaluation captures the expected consequence of a strategy choice by evaluating the endgame outcome net of all costs incurred. In those equilibrium strategies that also optimize expected ex post prospects, the defender may well choose to make low compromise offers in case of challenge despite the risk of war, while the challenger remains aggressive but contains his demands.
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SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
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2005
Theories of crisis bargaining implausibly assume that negotiations can take place at any time without any cost. Yet when rigidities such as the cost of changing the status quo or signaling costs, for example, are taken into account, negotiations can become too costly to revise frequently: agreements are “sticky” and extend for discrete periods of time. Non-continuous bargains leave the rising state with an opportunity loss, defined as the gains it would obtain if negotiations were updated continuously so as to ensure a perfect fit between the distribution of power and the distribution of benefits. Quick changes in relative power in a dyad and rigidities in the bargaining process can lead the rising actor to anticipate a large opportunity loss between two consecutive bargains, in which case there is no deal that both actors prefer to fighting. Ex ante negotiations can break down into war, even with complete information. 1 Contact information: Thomas Chadefaux, Ph.D. Student, Departme...
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American Political Science Review, 2003
Because war is costly and risky, states have incentives to negotiate and avoid conflict. The common rationalist explanation is that war results from private information and incentives to misrepresent it. By modeling warfare as a costly bargaining process, I show that inefficient fighting can occur in equilibrium under complete information and very general assumptions favoring peace. Specifically, I assume that peace can be supported in equilibrium, and that fighting brings no benefits to either state, only costs. Although there exist agreements that Pareto-dominate the final settlement, states may prefer to fight. The result turns on the ability of states to impose costs on their opponents, and bear costs in return. The existence of a range of acceptable settlements and the threat to revert to particularly disadvantageous ones make inefficient equilibria possible. A diminished ability to hurt the enemy, not simply military victory, is a major reason to stop fighting.
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Recent conflicts have increasingly occurred in the “gray zone” between peace and open warfare. Novel tactics—from cyber operations to “little green men”—may make aggression at low intensities more attractive to challengers (cheaper/more effective). Alternatively, existing deterrence networks may force motivated challengers to act more furtively (stability-instability). These dueling “push-pull” logics suggest contrasting conflict dynamics impacting stability and peace. We develop a game theoretic model to analyze gray zone conflict in which deterrence success is variable, rather than dichotomous. In the model, the scope and intensity of a challenger’s provocation varies inversely with the implicit credibility of the defender’s deterrent threat. We find empirical support for the stability-instability logic in Russian military actions since the 1990s; Russia is more restrained, and less effective, against nations in, or closely tied to, NATO. States face inherent trade-offs between st...
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The Armed Peace: A Punctuated Equilibrium Theory of War
American Journal of Political Science, 2005
According to a leading rationalist explanation, war can break out when a large, rapid shift of power causes a credible commitment problem. This mechanism does not specify how inefficient fighting can resolve this cause, so it is an incomplete explanation of war. We present a complete information model of war as a sequence of battles and show that although opportunities for a negotiated settlement arise throughout, the very desirability of peace creates a commitment problem that undermines its likelihood. Because players have incentives to settle as soon as possible, they cannot credibly threaten to fight long enough if an opponent launches a surprise attack. This decreases the expected duration and costs of war and causes mutual deterrence to fail. Fighting's destructiveness improves the credibility of these threats by decreasing the benefits from continuing the war and can eventually lead to peace. In equilibrium players can only terminate war at specific windows of opportunity and fighting results in escalating costs that can leave both players worse off at the time peace is negotiated than a full concession would have before the war began.
Fully Informed and on the Road to Ruin: The Perfect Failure of Asymmetric Deterrence
International Studies Quarterly, 2005
Most theoretical and formal arguments about rational deterrence assume that war is a game-ending move. In the asymmetric case, the logic of deterrent threats then rests on the relative merits of war and submission. Perfectly informed rivals ensure that immediate deterrence always succeeds although general deterrence may not. Does this strong result survive the repetition of the standard one-shot deterrence game? We show that an unbundling of the war outcome, and the resulting possible recurrence of a challenge to the status quo, changes the very nature of deterrent threats and can lead to the failure of immediate deterrence. If the status quo can be challenged repeatedly, it is rational, in case of challenge, for the rivals to threaten probabilistic escalation of the crisis to war with the following consequences: the challenger will challenge the status quo now and then; the defender finds it rational to resist at least for a while; the resulting recurrence of challenge, resistance, and escalation can lead the rivals to threaten, with some likelihood, wars that are long enough to be catastrophic for all parties.
A Theory of Brinkmanship, Conflicts, and Commitments
Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, 2007
Many conflicts and negotiations can be viewed as dynamic games in which parties have no commitment power. In our model, a potential aggressor demands concessions from a weaker party by threatening war. The absence of commitment makes a continuous stream of transfers a more effective appeasement strategy than a lump-sum transfer. As long as both sides have constant marginal utility of consumption, it is possible to construct a self-enforcing peace agreement even if transfers shift the balance of power. When marginal utility of consumption is decreasing, a self-enforcing peace agreement may not be feasible. The bargaining power of the potential aggressor increases dramatically if she is able to make probabilistic threats, for example, by taking an observable action that leads to war with a positive probability. This ''brinkmanship strategy'' allows a blackmailer to extract a positive stream of payments from the victim, even if carrying out the threat is harmful to both parties. Our results are applicable to environments ranging from diplomacy to negotiations within or among firms and are aimed to bring together ''parallel'' investigations in the nature of commitment in economics and political science.