Published papers:

Nd. “Cheap Talk Diplomacy, Voluntary Negotiations, and Variable Bargaining Power.”  forthcoming, International Studies Quarterly.

Abstract:  It is well known that during a crisis unitary rational states have an incentive to misrepresent their true resolve and willingness to go to war.  This theoretical result has been taken to imply that diplomacy, interpreted as pre-bargaining communication, can have no effect on the way crises play out.  This paper shows an intuitive way that diplomatic cheap talk can matter in a single crisis between countries, especially when the bargaining game has multiple equilibria. In particular, if after ``diplomacy'' states can choose to either fight a war directly or bargain in hopes of reaching a peaceful settlement, then it is possible to find an equilibrium where diplomacy influence whether there is war or peace. Importantly the cheap talk diplomacy does three things the standard model says it cannot: it coordinates actions, it reveals information, and it changes the ex ante probability of war.  This result demonstrates an easy way of reconciling the discrepancy between the obvious empirical observation that diplomacy often does influence the path of a crisis and the rationalist model of war.

2011. "Revisiting the Resource Curse: Natural Disasters, the Price of Oil, and Democracy." International Organization.

    Abstract:  Fluctuations in the price of oil and the contemporaneous political changes in oil countries have raised an important question about the link between oil rents, political institutions, and civil liberties.  This paper presents a simple model of the relationship between resource income and political freedom and, using an instrumental variables approach,  estimates the causal effect of shocks to oil revenues on levels of democracy.  Using a new data set, multiple measures of democracy, and various specifications, we find that the effect of oil price shocks is larger than might be expected and on the order of the effects found from changes in Gross Domestic Product. 

2011. "Uncertainty and Incentives in Crisis Bargaining: Game-Free Analysis of International Conflict." (with Mark Fey)  American Journal of Political Science.

    Abstract:  We study two different varieties of uncertainty that countries can face in international crises and establish general results about the relationship between these sources of uncertainty and the possibility of peaceful resolution of conflict.  Among our results, we show that under some weak conditions, there is no equilibrium of any crisis bargaining game that has voluntary agreements and zero probability of costly war.  We also show that while uncertainty about the other side's cost of war may be relatively benign in peace negotiations, uncertainty about the other side's strength in war makes it much more difficult to guarantee peaceful outcomes.  Along the way, we are able to asses the degree to which particular modeling assumptions found in the existing literature drive the well known relationship between uncertainty, the incentive to misrepresent, and costly war.  We find that while the theoretical connection between war and uncertainty is quite robust to relaxing many modeling assumptions, whether uncertainty is about costs or the probability of victory remains important.

2010. 2010. “When is Shuttle Diplomacy Worth the Commute?  Information Sharing through Mediation.” (with Mark Fey),  World Politics.
      

    Abstract:  We study the conflict mediation problem, sometimes called “shuttle diplomacy,” when the mediator acts as a go-between and must gather information from the disputants. In the context of a general model of information mediation, we show that the incentive that disputants have to lie to the mediator undoes any advantage that might be gained by adding communication with a third party. In fact, our main result shows that any equilibrium outcome that is achievable through mediation is also achievable as an equilibrium outcome of a game with unmediated pre-play communication. This is true even when the mediator is allowed to have arbitrary preferences or biases. We then test our empirical prediction on dispute management efforts between 1937 and 1985. The analysis supports the hypothesis that information mediation has no effect in environments where the mediator has no independent source of information.

2010. 2010."Burden-Sharing in Non-Binding Alliances." (with Songying Fang),  Political Research Quarterly.
      

    Abstract:  The authors develop a model of alliances with outside options to study burden sharing in nonbinding alliance agreements. The analysis provides an explanation for the variation in ally contributions to NATO over time and why the post–Cold War period has seen an increase in the use of coalitions of the willing. Additionally, the analysis reveals something of an initiator’s disadvantage in burden sharing—the initiator of an alliance action pays a disproportionate cost of the military burden. The authors’ argument provides an alternative explanation for why the United States has been consistently the largest contributor to NATO.

2009. 2009."Mechanism Design Goes to War: Peaceful Outcomes with Interdependent and Correlated Types" (with Mark Fey),  Review of Economic Design.
      

    Abstract:  In this paper, we consider the possibility of identifying peaceful mechanisms such as bargaining protocols, international institutions, or norms that can enable countries to settle disputes in the absence of binding contracts. In particular, we are interested in the existence of mechanisms with zero probability of war.  Here, we focus on situations where the countries’ payoffs to war are interdependent or correlated and where efficient settlements are not required but subsidies are unavailable. Most importantly, countries can choose to go to war at any time and can use information learned from the negotiation process in making this choice. We characterize the conditions under which no peaceful mechanisms exist and discuss how weakening our war consistency condition can change this result.

2008. 2008."Settling it on the Field: Battlefield Events and War Termination."  Journal of Conflict Resolution
      

    Abstract:  Using a sample of battlefield data from twentieth-century wars, the author of this article tests a number of previously untested hypotheses linking battle events and the decision to end violent conflict. The author explores how factors like the distribution of power,  battlefield casualties, and information that flows from the battlefield influence war termination.  The analysis speaks to the validity of competing rational choice theories of war termination.

2008. 2008. "Design, Inference and The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism"  (with Scott Ashworth, Josh Clinton, and Adam Meirowtiz) American Political Science Review.
      

    Abstract:  In “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” Robert Pape (2003) presents an analysis of his suicide terrorism data. He uses the data to draw inferences about how territorial occupation and religious extremism affect the decision of terrorist groups to use suicide tactics. We show that the data are incapable of supporting Pape’s conclusions because he “samples on the dependent variable.”—–The data only contain cases in which suicide terror is used. We construct bounds (Manski, 1995) on the quantities relevant to Pape’s hypotheses and show exactly how little can be learned about the relevant statistical associations from the data produced by Pape’s research design.

--- 2008. The response. American Political Science Review. 

--- A few thoughts on the response. 

2007. 2007."Mutual Optimism and War." (with Mark Fey),   American Journal of Political Science.
      

    Abstract:  Working with the definition of mutual optimism as war due to inconsistent beliefs, we formalize the mutual optimism argument to test the theory’s logical validity. We find that in the class of strategic situations where mutual optimism is a necessary condition for war—i.e., where war is known to be inefficient, war only occurs if both sides prefer it to a negotiated settlement, and on the eve of conflict war is self-evident—then there is no Bayesian-Nash equilibrium where wars are fought because of mutual optimism. The fundamental reason that mutual optimism cannot lead to war is that if both sides are willing to fight, each side should infer that they have either underestimated the strength of the opponent or overestimated their own strength. In either case, these inferences lead to a peaceful settlement of the dispute. We also show that this result extends to situations in which there is bounded rationality and/or noncommon priors.

2006. 2006."The Common Priors Assumption: A comment on Bargaining and the Nature of War." (with Mark Fey) Journal of Conflict Resolution.
      

    Abstract:  In a recent article in this journal, Smith and Stam (2004) call into question the usefulness and applicability of what is know as the common priors assumption in the modeling of countries’ strategic behavior in international relations. While the authors of this comment acknowledge that it is possible to incorporate noncommon priors in models of politics in a mathematically consistent fashion, they do not agree with the article’s claims regarding the limitations of the common priors approach, which motivate Smith and Stam’s rejection of it.

2004. "Politics at the Water's Edge: Crisis Bargaining and Electoral Competition." Journal of Conflict Resolution.

    Abstract: The role of domestic politics is investigated, using a model to show how domestic opposition during a crisis can reveal to a rival state private information about the incumbent. In particular, the public nature of democratic competition results in the institutionally induced credibility of the message.

Unpublished papers:

"A Statistical Model of the Divide-the-Dollar Game" (with Curtis Signorino)

    Abstract:  In this paper we derive a statistical estimator to be used when the data generating process is best described as an equilibrium to the popular ultimatum bargaining game with private information and private values. This procedure gives the analyst the ability to estimate the effect of substantively interesting covariates on equilibrium behavior in this work horse bargaining model. Using Monte Carlo analysis we explore the small sample properties of this estimator and compare how the inference one makes with this model differ from those generated by linear and generalized linear models. We end by demonstrating the real world effect of using our estimator with a re-analysis of results from ultimatum lab experiments where subject covariates are hypothesized to explain bargaining behavior. We find, contrary to the experimental claim, there is no evidence of a uniform “national” effect on offers in this data when the bargaining estimator is used and that many demographic characteristics and their interactions are good predictors of bargaining behavior.

"Optimism in Bayesian Games with Mutual Actions." (with Mark Fey)

    Abstract:  Various well known agreement theorems show that if players have a common prior and there is common knowledge of posteriors Aumann (1976), common knowledge of feasible trade Milgrom and Stokey(1982), or common knowledge of actions Geanakoplos (1994), then  two players cannot agree to disagree or agree to forgo a Pareto optimal outcome simply because of private information.  We present a non-speculation theorem that is similar to the non-speculation theorem of Geanakoplos (1994) and requires only common knowledge of rationality to rule out equilibrium speculation.  While our result and Geanakoplos's are closely related, the proof of our theorem provides an intuitive and simple understanding of the strategic interaction that occurs in this class of games.  It also suggests a connection to other well known phenomena like the winner's curse and the swing voter's curse.

"Mutual Optimism and Unilateral War." (with Mark Fey)

    Abstract:  In this paper we examine whether mutual optimism can be supported as a cause of war in models that permit the unilateral use of force. Fey and Ramsay (2007) demonstrate that war cannot occur in any game in which both sides must agree in order to fight. With the more realistic assumption that either side can unilaterally use force, however, war is possible in equilibrium.  But we show that mutual optimism is still not a valid explanation for war, because it is neither always necessary or sufficient for war in equilibrium.

"Investment and Bargaining" (with Adam Meirowitz)

    Abstract:  We consider bargaining between two players who may invest ex ante in their agreement and disagreement payoffs. We characterize necessary conditions on equilibrium investment strategies in this environment, describe how investments and the probability of outcomes must vary across mechanisms, and specify what equilibrium conditions imply for constraints on various aspects of the design environment. In the case of private values any two trading rules that induce the same equilibrium lotteries over valuations induce the same probability of trade.  We also show that equilibrium descriptions are fragile in the sense that descriptions that cannot be supported by any equilibrium investment decisions are dense in the space of problems. We exhibit an approach to recovering cost functions that support the primitives of a Bayesian Mechanism design problem. By way of an example, we use an unraveling argument to show that uniform distributions over valuations cannot emerge from equilibria investments to the Chatterjee-Samuelson bilateral trade mechanism for any strictly increasing cost functions.

"Optimal Domestic Constraints in International Crises" (with Scott Ashworth)  

    Abstract:  We study a model in which a leader's crisis behavior and the citizens' responses are both determined  optimally. The citizens design incentives with two problems in mind. First, our model identifies a heretofore unnoticed time-consistency problem on the part of leaders who might initiate international crises. Second, we allow the leader and the citizen to disagree about when war is an appropriate policy option.  In the optimal scheme, citizens always punish leaders who initiate crises and then back down. Whether they punish leaders for backing down rather than going to war, on the other hand, depends on the status quo and on the costs of war. We identify the conditions under which citizens use re-selection incentives to offset  the different preferences over fighting (which involves punishing fighting), and the conditions under which they use ``audience costs'' to exaggerate that preference divergence (which involves rewarding fighting).