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。“当两个国家以互不相容的要求面对对方时，就会发生国际危机。一般来说，各国不会做出让步，除非它们确信战争的另一种选择将更加令人不快。危机谈判是相互威胁，目的是说服对手，如果自己的要求得不到满足，自己有使用武力的政治意愿，而且相对于对方所要求的让步，自己有军事能力使战争变得足够不愉快。这些威胁不会起作用，除非对手相信这两个要求都得到了满足——也就是说，它们必须是可信的。我们对危机谈判的研究得出的一般结论是，为了获得信誉，参与者必须采取他们除非认真对待战斗，否则无法或不会采取的行动。我们研究了军事实力强大的国家表明其决心的多种方式，我们已经了解到，如果一个国家可以这样做，那么它就会在危机中显示出实力和决心：假装软弱永远不会有好处。逻辑很简单：如果一方成功地佯装软弱，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，似乎没有理由表现出软弱。然而，在某些情况下，即使对手倾向于通过外交途径解决问题，他们也隐藏了自己的实力（例如，中国在1950年干预朝鲜战争之前），从我们的理论角度来看，这些都是相当令人费解的。这个项目调查了在危机中一个坚强而坚定的行动者可能假装软弱的条件。运用博弈论数学模型研究战前危机议价与战争的关系。需要探讨的问题包括：国家在危机期间传递和获取的信息如何影响其战斗策略，追求最佳战斗策略如何与追求和平解决危机的手段发生冲突，行为者如何故意误导对手产生虚假的优越感并冒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启示。该项目旨在推进战争起因的理论，同时提出这样一种观点，即战争应该被视为一种相互依赖的投资，需要付出高昂的努力来说服对手让步，所选择的战略反映了人们对对手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过程的研究，而不是终止政治交流的结果。该项目旨在改善国际关系理论，但它的贡献更广泛。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的想法。虽然理论发展是技术性的，但由于其对决策的影响，必须将其结果传达给更广泛的受众。

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.