The Inefficient Use of Power: Costly Conflict with Complete Information

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Much work on the causes and conduct of war see it as a kind of bargaining process. As such, a central puzzle is explaining why bargaining ever breaks down in costly fighting. That is, fighting typically destroys resources, and, consequently, the "pie" to be divided after the fighting has begun is smaller than it was before the fighting started. This means that there generally are divisions of the larger pie that would have given each bargainer more than it will have after any fighting. Fighting, in other words, leads to Pareto inefficient outcomes. Why, then, do the bargainers fail to reach a Pareto superior agreement prior to any fighting and thereby avoid war? International relations theory offers two broad types of rationalist explanation: informational problems and commitment problems. The former arise when (1) the bargainers have private information about, for example, their payoffs to prevailing or about their military capabilities, and (2) the bargainers have incentives to misrepresent their private information. Commitment problems arise if the bargainers are unable to commit themselves to following through on an agreement and have incentives to renege on it.Recent formal work on the causes of war has focused almost exclusively on informational problems. But informational explanations and the models underlying them have at least two major limitations. They often provide a poor account of prolonged and protracted conflict, and they also offer a bizarre reading of the history of some cases. This project investigates two types of commitment problem. The first appears to happen if there are large and rapid shifts in the distribution of power. Preliminary work indicates that this mechanism underlies and unifies several recent and substantively diverse studies in American, comparative, and international politics. The second type of commitment problem results from the fact that states must expend resources to maintain the status quo (i.e., deter an attack). If this cost is too high, states may prefer to fight.These kinds of mechanism seem to provide a better account of the origins and continuation of some conflicts than informational accounts do.Broader MeritIn addition to contributing to the development of international relations theory, this project makes three broader contributions. First, the application includes a request for a graduate student research assistant. When the researcher takes on a research assistant for an NSF grant, he views this as taking on the role of faculty mentor and of trying to help that person develop his or her scholarship to the fullest extent possible both during and after the grant. This promotes teaching, training, and learning. Second, the investigator will communicate findings broadly to a wider audience than the small group of scholars using game theory to study conflict. The investigator did this in his previous NSF project by publishing more accessible treatments in the journal International Security. This journal speaks to a wider policy audience than most political science journals do. Finally, war is a hugely important social issue, and helping to develop a better understanding of its causes contributes to society.