Bargaining and Power in Ongoing Relationships

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Within the field of international relations, the subfields of security studies and international political economy remain largely isolated from each other. This project develops a more coherent and general way of looking at political bargaining in anarchy - be it over issues typically associated with security studies or international political economy (or domestic politics). To achieve this end, the investigator produces a series of papers that study the effects of relaxing key assumptions that currently define the state-of-the-art in the modeling of security studies.The limitations of the much recent formal work in international relations theory is that it generally models the exercise of power as a once-and-for-all decision. Formally, the games used in these analyses usually end as soon as any player attempts to exercise power by going to war or, more broadly, by imposing a settlement.A related, but heretofore unemphasized limitation is that many bargaining games in both economics and international relation's theory also end as soon as one of the players accepts an offer. Thus no bargainer can renege on an offer or an agreement even if it would like to, because the game tree does not allow for it. In a sense then, these games violate the assumption of anarchy in that they implicitly allow a bargainer to commit itself to honoring its offers.This research studies the effects of relaxing these limitations in two ways. First, the bargainers are able to renege on their offers. As it happens, this new assumption, which grows out of international relations theory, provides a natural answer to a central puzzle in modern bargaining theory. In the late 1980s, bargaining theorists expected that the presence of incomplete information would explain why there is delay in bargaining, i.e., why bargainers often take a long time to reach an agreement. But, these expectations proved incorrect in the standard models. Even with incomplete information, there was no delay. Surprisingly, delay does seem to be a direct consequence of incomplete information once the players can also renege.Second, this project relaxes the assumption that the use of power is a game-ending strategy. One facet of this problem models the exercise of power as a more explicit series of interacting decisions. The focus here is on how the expected outcomes of this process shapes the bargaining that occurs before the exercise of power begins.A second facet focuses on the fact that the exercise of power rarely eliminates actors. Strategic interaction often continues after the explicit exercise of power has ended. And, once the use of power is viewed in this way, a common strategic problem appears t underlie many problems in security affairs, international political economy, and domestic politics. This research characterizes this problem and analyzes the relation between bargaining and power in it.