Suchergebnisse

We consider rent-seeking contests with two players who each have private information about their own cost of effort. We consider both discrete and continuous distributions of costs and give results for each case, focusing on existence of equilibrium. Adapted from the source document.

This paper investigates the dynamics of the "wasted vote" phenomenon and Duverger's Law. I construct a theoretical model in order to consider how preelection polls serve to inform the electorate about the relative chances of the candidates and how that information acts over time to decrease the support of the trailing candidate. The results shed light on how public opinion polls can aggregate information in the electorate and coordinate voters on the viable candidates in the election. Specifically, I show that in a Bayesian game model of strategic voting there exist non-Duvergerian equilibria in which all three candidates receive votes (in the limit). These equilibria require extreme coordination, however, and any variation in beliefs leads voters away from them to one of the Duvergerian equilibria. Thus, non-Duvergerian equilibria are unstable, while two-party equilibria are not. In addition, I describe how preelection polls provide information to voters about the viability of candidates and can thus be used by voters to coordinate on a Duvergerian outcome.

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 assess 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. Adapted from the source document.

The authors 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, they 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, the main result shows that any equilibrium outcome that is achievable through mediation is also achievable as an equilibrium outcome of a game with unmediated preplay communication. This is true even when the mediator is allowed to have arbitrary preferences or biases. The authors then test their 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.