Two Cheers for Bargaining Theory: Assessing Rationalist Explanations of the Iraq War

2010 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 7-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Lake
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Private Information ◽  
Iraq War ◽  
Conflicts Of Interest ◽  
Bargaining Theory ◽  
Credible Commitment ◽  
Prior Beliefs ◽  
Multiple Audiences ◽  
Theory Of War ◽  
Governance Costs

The Iraq War has received little sustained analysis from scholars of international relations. I assess the rationalist approach to war—or, simply, bargaining theory—as one possible explanation of the conflict. Bargaining theory correctly directs attention to the inherently strategic nature of all wars. It also highlights problems of credible commitment and asymmetric information that lead conflicts of interest, ubiquitous in international relations, to turn violent. These strategic interactions were central to the outbreak of the Iraq War in 2003. Nonetheless, bargaining theory is inadequate as an explanation of the Iraq War. Although the problem of credible commitment was real, it could not be solved because of the prior beliefs of the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein was uniquely evil and because of Saddam's inability to signal accurately to multiple audiences, both factors now outside bargaining theory. Nor was the problem of private information an important impediment to bargaining; rather, the information failures observed in both Washington and Baghdad were of their own making as each formed self-deluding beliefs and expectations. Bargaining theory also ignores postwar governance costs and domestic interest groups, both of which contributed to the war. All of these problems require either considerable amendments to the theory or the revision of core assumptions. Drawing on this critique, the final sections draw out the analytic and policy lessons of the Iraq War and suggest, most importantly, the need for a new behavioral theory of war.

Rational Extremism: Understanding Terrorism in the Twenty-first Century

Dialogue IO ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Lake
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Private Information ◽  
First Century ◽  
Ethnic Conflicts ◽  
Credible Commitment ◽  
War Termination ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Integrated Theory ◽  
Causes Of War

In the last decade, the field of international relations has undergone a revolution in conflict studies. Where earlier approaches attempted to identify the attributes of individuals, states, and systems that produced conflict, the “rationalist approach to war” now explains violence as the product of private information with incentives to misrepresent, problems of credible commitment, and issue indivisibilities. In this new approach, war is understood as a bargaining failure that leaves both sides worse off than had they been able to negotiate an efficient solution. This rationalist framework has proven remarkably general—being applied to civil wars, ethnic conflicts, and interstate wars—and fruitful in understanding not only the causes of war but also war termination and conflict management. Interstate war is no longer seen as sui generis, but as a particular form within a single, integrated theory of conflict.

Brokering Peace in Nuclear Environments

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moeed Yusuf
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Bargaining Theory ◽  
The Third ◽  
China And India ◽  
International Setting ◽  
Multiple Audiences ◽  
Crisis Behavior ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Shed Light

This book is the first to theorize third party mediation in crises between regional nuclear powers. Its relevance flows from two of the most significant international developments since the end of the Cold War: the emergence of regional nuclear rivalries; and the shift from the Cold War’s bipolar context to today’s unipolar international setting. Moving away from the traditional bilateral deterrence models, the book conceptualizes crisis behavior as “brokered bargaining”: a three-way bargaining framework where the regional rivals and the ‘third party’ seek to influence each other to behave in line with their crisis objectives and in so doing, affect each other’s crisis behavior. The book tests brokered bargaining theory by examining U.S.-led crisis management in South Asia, analyzing three major crises between India and Pakistan: the Kargil conflict, 1999; the 2001-02 nuclear standoff; and the Mumbai crisis, 2008. The case studies find strong evidence of behavior predicted by the brokered bargaining framework. They also shed light on several risks of misperceptions and inadvertence due to the challenges inherent in signaling to multiple audiences simultaneously. Traditional explanations rooted in bilateral deterrence models do not account for these, leaving a void with serious practical consequences, which the introduction of brokered bargaining seeks to fill. The book’s findings also offer lessons for crises on the Korean peninsula, between China and India, and between potential nuclear rivals in the Middle East.

Bargaining Theory and Rationalist Explanations for the Iraq War

2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 172-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael K. McKoy ◽  
David A. Lake
Keyword(s):  
Iraq War ◽  
Bargaining Theory

The evolution of war: theory and controversy

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony C. Lopez
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
International Politics ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Social ◽  
Theory Of War ◽  
Modern Warfare ◽  
The Human Condition

The use of evolutionary theory for explaining human warfare is an expanding area of inquiry, but it remains obstructed by two important hurdles. One is that there is ambiguity abouthow to build an evolutionary theoryof human warfare. The second is that there is ambiguity abouthow to interpret existing evidencerelating to the evolution of warfare. This paper addresses these problems, first by outlining an evolutionary theory of human warfare, and second by investigating the veracity of four common claims made against the use of evolutionary theory for explaining warfare. These claims are: (1) ancestral warfare was not frequent or intense enough to have selected for psychological adaptations in humans for warfare; (2) the existence of peaceful societies falsifies the claim that humans possess adaptations for fighting; (3) if psychological adaptations for warfare exist, then war is an inevitable and universal component of the human condition; (4) modern warfare and international politics is so qualitatively different from ancestral politics that any adaptations for the latter are inoperative or irrelevant today. By outlining an evolutionary theory of war and clarifying key misunderstandings regarding this approach, international relations scholars are better positioned to understand, engage, and contribute to emerging scholarship on human warfare across the social and evolutionary sciences.

Estimating the Severity of the WikiLeaks U.S. Diplomatic Cables Disclosure

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Gill ◽  
Arthur Spirling
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Private Information ◽  
Minimum Variance ◽  
Prison Sentence ◽  
The Public ◽  
Discrete Uniform Distribution ◽  
Discrete Uniform ◽  
Official Sources ◽  
The U.S

In November 2010, the WikiLeaks organization began the release of over 250,000 diplomatic cables sent by U.S. embassies to the U.S. State Department, uploaded to its website by (then) Private Manning, an intelligence analyst with the U.S. Army. This leak was widely condemned, including by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. We assess the severity of the leak by considering the size of the disclosure relative to all diplomatic cables that were in existence at the time—a quantity that is not known outside official sources. We rely on the fact that the cables that were leaked are internally indexed in such a way that they may be treated as a sample from a discrete uniform distribution with unknown maximum; this is a version of the well-known “German Tank Problem.” We consider three estimators that rely on discrete uniformity—maximum likelihood, Bayesian, and frequentist unbiased minimum variance—and demonstrate that the results are very similar in all cases. To supplement these estimators, we employ a regression-based procedure that incorporates the timing of cables' release in addition to their observed serial numbers. We estimate that, overall, approximately 5% of all cables from this timeframe were leaked, but that this number varies considerably at the embassy-year level. Our work provides a useful characterization of the sample of documents available to international relations scholars interested in testing theories of “private information,” while helping inform the public debate surrounding Manning's trial and 35-year prison sentence.

Empirically Assessing the Bargaining Theory of War: Potential and Challenges

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik A. Gartzke ◽  
Paul Poast
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Empirical Investigation ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Bargaining Theory ◽  
Empirical Tests ◽  
Theory Of War ◽  
International War ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Commitment Problems ◽  
Bargaining Approach

What explains war? The so-called bargaining approach has evolved quickly in the past two decades, opening up important new possibilities and raising fundamental challenges to previous conventional thinking about the origins of political violence. Bargaining is intended to explain the causes of conflict on many levels, from interpersonal to international. War is not the product of any of a number of variables creating opportunity or willingness, but instead is caused by whatever factors prevent competitors from negotiating the settlements that result from fighting. Conflict is thus a bargaining failure, a socially inferior outcome, but also a determined choice.Embraced by a growing number of scholars, the bargaining perspective rapidly created a new consensus in some circles. Bargaining theory is radical in relocating at least some of the causes of conflict away from material, cultural, political, or psychological factors and replacing them with states of knowledge about these same material or ideational factors. Approaching conflict as a bargaining failure—produced by uncertainty and incentives to misrepresent, credible commitment problems, or issue indivisibility—is the “state of the art” in the study of conflict.At the same time, bargaining theories remain largely untested in any systematic sense: theory has moved far ahead of empirics. The bargaining perspective has been favored largely because of compelling logic rather than empirical validity. Despite the bargaining analogy’s wide-ranging influence (or perhaps because of this influence), scholars have largely failed to subject the key causal mechanisms of bargaining theory to systematic empirical investigation. Further progress for bargaining theory, both among adherents and in the larger research community, depends on empirical tests of both core claims and new theoretical implications of the bargaining approach.The limited amount of systematic empirical research on bargaining theories of conflict is by no means entirely accident or the product of lethargy on the part of the scholarly community. Tests of theories that involve intangible factors like states of belief or perception are difficult to pursue. How does one measure uncertainty? What does learning look like in the midst of a war? When is indivisibility or commitment a problem, and when can it be resolved through other measures, such as ancillary bargains? The challenge before researchers, however, is to surmount these obstacles. To the degree that progress in science is empirical, bargaining theory needs testing.As should be clear, the dearth of empirical tests of bargaining approaches to the study of conflict leaves important questions unanswered. Is it true, for example, as bargaining theory suggests, that uncertainty leads to the possibility of war? If so, how much uncertainty is required and in what contexts? Which types of uncertainty are most pernicious (and which are perhaps relatively benign)? Under what circumstances are the effects of uncertainty greatest and where are they least critical? Empirical investigation of the bargaining model can provide essential guidance to theoretical work on conflict by identifying insights that can offer intellectual purchase and by highlighting areas of inquiry that are likely to be empirical dead ends. More broadly, the impact of bargaining theory on the study and practice of international relations rests to a substantial degree on the success of efforts to substantiate the perspective empirically.

How analyst recommendations respond to corporate uncertainty caused by investment behavior

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Longwen Zhang ◽  
Minghai Wei
Keyword(s):  
Private Information ◽  
Conflicts Of Interest ◽  
Earnings Forecasts ◽  
Corporate Investment ◽  
Investment Behavior ◽  
Analyst Recommendations ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Information Transparency ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Earnings Forecasting

Purpose Corporate investment behavior increases the uncertainty of a company’s operation and performance. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how analyst recommendations respond to corporate uncertainty caused by investment behavior and what motivates analysts to react as they do. Design/methodology/approach The authors test two motivation hypotheses: the hypothesis that analysts are currying favor with management to obtain private information and the hypothesis that analysts have conflicts of interest due to connections. Using Chinese analyst-level data from 2007 to 2015, the authors find that overall investment levels, R&D investment and M&A events are significantly positively correlated with analyst recommendations, suggesting that analysts tend to react optimistically to corporate investment behavior. Findings Analysts are only optimistic about companies with low information transparency, suggesting that analysts may be trying to curry favor with management to gain access to private information. The authors find that analysts with stronger recommendations have more private information and analysts with more private information publish more accurate earnings forecasts, which supports the hypothesis that analysts curry favor with management through optimistic recommendations to obtain more private information. This is consistent with the logic that the difficulty of earnings forecasting increases under uncertain conditions, increasing the demand for private information. The authors then group the analysts according to their underwriting connections, securities company’s proprietary connections and fund connections, and find that the positive correlation between corporate investment behavior and analyst recommendations exists only in the unconnected groups. This is evidence against the hypothesis that analysts have conflicts of interest due to their connections. Originality/value First, the authors link the optimism of analysts with the uncertainty of analysts’ information inputs to partially unpack the black box of analysts’ analyses. Second, the authors test the two hypotheses mentioned. There is a lack of comparative studies on the influence of different motivations on the behavior of analysts.

scholarly journals How Do People Search Information on Content and Sources? Integrating Source Search in Information Boards

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonie Aßmann ◽  
Holger Futterleib ◽  
Tilmann Betsch ◽  
Eva Thomm ◽  
Johannes Bauer
Keyword(s):  
Information Search ◽  
Conflicts Of Interest ◽  
Source Information ◽  
Prior Beliefs ◽  
Educational Domain ◽  
Standard Information ◽  
People Search ◽  
Information Board ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Content Information

Information forms the basis for beliefs, judgements, decision making, and behavior. Nowadays, the amount of information available is continually increasing. Still, the quality and credibility of the corresponding sources vary widely. Thus, to avoid making judgments and decisions on basis of biased information, the credibility of information and sources must be carefully evaluated. However, information regarding the source is often not immediately accessible and, instead, must be purposefully sought. The standard information board paradigm does not include such a source information search. Therefore, we investigated whether that paradigm can be extended with an active search of source information in order to investigate search behaviors with regard to content und source information. To do so, we presented participants with information boards on different topics from two domains (i.e., health and education). The boards contained a question to outline the topic of information search in addition to four related sources. For each source, we provided information on topic-related expertise and potential conflicts of interest as well as content information regarding the question (i.e., pro and contra arguments). Information was hidden so that participants had to actively search the information. We were interested in the search start, search amount, differences in search between the domains and belief revision due to information search. Results show that participants primarily began information search with source expertise before continuing on to content information. In general, both content and source information were searched. Domain did not influence the start but the search amount⎯more information was searched on topics in the educational domain. In addition, search appeared to influence prior beliefs. For some topics, we observed changes in beliefs following information search.The findings indicate that our variations in the information board paradigm can be used to investigate content information search and source information search simultaneously.

MODERN TENDENCIES IN DEVELOPMENT OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON TOURISM PROGRESS

2003 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-82
Author(s):  
Ivan Vuković
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Iraq War ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
Modern Development ◽  
Informational Technology ◽  
The World ◽  
Great Progress ◽  
Ecological Development ◽  
Ecological Relations

Modern development of international relations, on the turn from 20th into the 21st century, including political, economical, scientific-technological and ecological relations, reflects on tourism progress in Europe and in the world. Expectations and scientific evaluations in 21st century predict it to be the century of great progress based on knowledge and balance of international relations, but current tendencies indicate negative characteristics due to terrorism, Iraq war, war between Israel and Palestine, all disturbing this vision of harmony. It is obvious that these processes will influence on development of political international relations, movements in economical perspective and progress contradictions. Tourism progress encountering progress of scientific-technological development, particularly informational technology, and significance of ecological development, as a presumption for healthy progress, all of these being important presumptions for tourism development in 21st century.

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