Conflict Bargaining with Endogenous Distribution of Power

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。“国际危机发生在两个国家以互不相容的要求相互对抗时。一般来说，各国不会做出让步，除非它们确信战争的替代方案将更加令人不快。危机谈判是相互威胁，目的是说服对手，如果一方的要求得不到满足，一方有使用武力的政治意愿，而且一方有军事能力使对手对战争感到相当不愉快。除非对手相信这两个要求都得到满足，也就是说，这些威胁必须是可信的，否则这些威胁不会起作用。从我们对危机谈判的研究中得出的一般结论是，为了获得可信度，行动者必须采取行动，除非他们认真对待战斗，否则他们不可能或不会采取行动。我们研究了军事上强大的行动者表明其决心的许多方式，我们认识到，如果可以，那么在危机中就表明力量和决心：假装软弱是没有好处的。逻辑很简单：如果一方成功地假装软弱，对手就不会让步，而一方将不得不打一场代价高昂、风险很大的战争。因此，如果一个国家很强大，似乎没有理由发出软弱的信号。然而，在有些情况下，反对者隐藏了他们的实力，尽管他们更愿意实现外交解决（例如，中国人在1950年介入朝鲜战争之前），从我们的理论角度来看，这些都是相当令人困惑的。本项目研究了一个强大的决心行动者在危机中可能假装软弱的条件。运用博弈论的数学模型研究了战前危机谈判与战争的关系。需要探讨的问题包括：国家在危机期间传递和获得的信息如何影响其作战战略，追求最佳作战战略如何可能与追求和平解决危机的手段发生冲突，行为者如何可能故意误导对手产生虚假的优越感，冒着威慑失败的风险，以获得军事优势，使这种佯攻或多或少可能发生的条件，以及对危机谈判信号理论的影响。该项目旨在推进战争原因的理论，并提出这样的概念，即战争应被视为相互依赖的投资，付出昂贵的努力说服对手让步，所选择的战略反映了一个人对对手的政治意愿和军事能力的看法。这进一步发展了战争作为一个互动的过程，而不是一个结果，终止政治交换的研究。该项目旨在改善国际关系理论，但它作出了更广泛的贡献。该模型中作战部分的发展旨在使我们的战争理论更接近决策者和军官在设计战争计划时所考虑的问题。虽然理论的发展是技术性的，但其结果必须传达给更广泛的受众，因为它们对决策的影响。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009(Public Law 111-5)."International crises occur when two states confront each other with mutually incompatible demands. In general, states will not make concessions unless they are convinced that the alternative of fighting will be even more unpleasant. Crisis negotiations are exchanges of threats designed to persuade the opponent that one has the political will to use force if one's demands are not met, and that one has the military capabilities to render war sufficiently unpleasant to the opponent relative to the concessions demanded. These threats will not work unless the opponent believes both of these requirements are met-that is, they must be credible. The general conclusion from our studies of crisis bargaining is that to achieve credibility, actors must take actions that they could not, or would not, have taken unless they were serious about fighting. We have studied numerous ways in which militarily strong actors can signal their resolve, and we have learned that if one can, then one signals strength and resolve in a crisis: it never pays to pretend to be weak. The logic is straightforward: if one feigns weakness successfully, the opponent will not concede, and one would have to fight a costly and risky war. Hence, there appears to be no reason to signal weakness if one is strong. There are, however, instances in which opponents have concealed their strength even though they preferred to achieve a diplomatic solution (e.g., the Chinese prior to their intervention in the Korean War in 1950), and these are quite puzzling from our theoretical perspective.This project investigates conditions under which a strong resolved actor might pretend to be weak during a crisis. It uses game-theoretic mathematical models to study the relationship between pre-war crisis bargaining and war-fighting. Among the questions to be explored are: how the information states transmit and obtain during the crisis influences their fighting strategies, how the pursuit of optimal fighting strategies might clash with the pursuit of peaceful means of crisis resolution, how actors might deliberately mislead the opponent into a false sense of superiority and risk deterrence failure in order to obtain a military advantage, the conditions that make such feints more or less likely, and the implications for the signaling theories of crisis bargaining. The project aims to advance the theories of the causes of war as well by advancing the notion that war should be seen as interdependent investments in costly effort to persuade the opponent to concede, with strategies chosen reflecting what one believes about the opponent's political will and military capacity. This further develops the study of war as an interactive process instead of an outcome that terminates political exchange.The project aims to improve international relations theory, but it makes broader contributions. The development of the war-fighting component of the model is meant to bring our theories of war closer to what policy-makers and military officers seem to have in mind when they design war plans. Although the theoretical development is technical, the results must be communicated to a wider audience because of their implication for policy-making.