Uncertainty and Incentives in Crisis Bargaining: GameFree Analysis of International Conflict

The formal literature on international conflict has identified the combination of uncertainty and the incentive to misrepresent private information as a central cause of war. But there is a fundamental problem with using game-theoretic models to formulate general claims such as these—whether and to what extent a result that holds in a particular choice of game form continues to hold when different modeling choices are made is typically unknown. To address this concern, we present techniques from Bayesian mechanism design that allow us to establish general “game-free” results that must hold in any equilibrium of any game form in a broad class of crisis bargaining games. We focus on three different varieties of uncertainty that countries can face and establish general results about the relationship between these sources of uncertainty and the possibility of peaceful resolution of conflict. We find that in the most general setting of uncertainty about the value of war, there is no equilibrium of any possible crisis bargaining game form that allows the unilateral use of force that completely avoids the chance of costly war. ∗We have benefited from comments received at the University of Rochester’s Peter D. Watson Center and Princeton’s International Relations Colloquium. We particularly thank Scott Ashworth, Dan Bernhardt, Josh Clinton, Tom Christensen, John Duggan, Jay Lyall, Adam Meirowitz, Andy Moravcsik, Tom Palfrey, Tom Romer, Curt Signorino, and Randy Stone. Any remaining errors are our own. †Department of Political Science, University of Rochester. email: [email protected] ‡Department of Politics, Princeton University, email: [email protected]