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Uncertainty about capabilities, intent, or resolve has long been linked to war. More recently, the bargaining model of war has established uncertainty, also referred to as asymmetric information, as one of the two major causes of costly conflict, the other being the dynamics of commitment in anarchy. A growing theoretical literature has made significant strides in fleshing out causal mechanisms and expanding our understanding of the role of information in conflict onset and how it relates to crisis bargaining and arms races. This article reviews these theoretical developments and describes current efforts to better understand the relationships between information, uncertainty, and war.

Intelligence scholars are drawing on behavioural decision theory to improve decision-making under risk and uncertainty in intelligence and counterintelligence. Such an undertaking is essentially lacking without the Austrian school's concepts of knowledge, discovery, (entrepreneurial) judgement, ignorance, rational calculation and, more generally, its analysis of human action in the face of true uncertainty. Decision theory, both orthodox and behavioural, depicts decision rather narrowly as a prioritisation task undertaken within a delineated problem space where the probabilities 'sum to one'. From such a perspective, certain perennial challenges in intelligence and counterintelligence appear resolvable when in fact they are not, at least not when approached from the usual direction. We explain how Austrian concepts can complement efforts to improve intelligence decision-making. We conclude that the future strategic value of intelligence analysis is located beyond information acquisition, however fast and however vast. Intelligence agencies have no price signals to help them determine how much intelligence to produce. And governments have no price signals to moderate their appetites for the intelligence product. Ultimately, those agencies that recognise the implications of intelligence agencies as non-price institutions and adapt their decision-making processes may find that they have the upper hand over their rivals.

More often than not production processes are the joint endeavor of people having different abilities and productivities. Such production processes and the associated surplus production are often not fully transparent in the sense that the relative contributions of involved agents are blurred; either by lack of information about the actual performance of collaborators or because of random noise in the production process or both. These variables likely influence the surplus sharing negotiations following the production. By means of a laboratory experiment, we systematically investigate their role for the whole bargaining process from opening offers to (dis)agreements and find that uncertainties in surplus production and (even) a very coarse performance information lead to bargaining asymmetries. In addition, we find that bargainers' subjective entitlements are also influenced by performance information and the randomness inherent in the production process. These differences in subjective entitlements together with the differences in entitlements between better and worse performers influence the whole bargaining process and significantly contribute to the differences in bargaining outcomes. -- bargaining ; performance information ; randomness in production process ; entitlements ; experiments

Dissertação de mest., Finanças Corporativas, Faculdade de Economia, Univ. do Algarve, 2012 ; This study is a systematic literature review of two areas of the finance literature: dividend policy and information uncertainty. My objective is identifying suitable research gaps to be explored at the PhD level. A brief overview of the thematic under analysis is presented in the first part of the study. Subsequently, a detailed analysis of the systematic literature review methodology is provided, including both the search strategy employed and the different selection criteria used. The last part presents the results. My main conclusion is that both themes have received considerable attention from many finance scholars but some interesting research questions still remain unsettled, providing the context for future research in the field. ; A presente dissertação explora a relação entre dois temas actualmente muito importantes para a literatura da área das finanças: a política de dividendos e a incerteza da informação. O nosso principal objectivo é perceber de que forma a literatura existente trata estes dois temas de forma conjunta. A investigação é conduzida através do método da revisão sistemática de literatura, sendo a nossa principal conclusão de que, exceptuando os trabalhos de Chay and Suh (2009) e Bradley, Capozza and Seguin (1996, 1998), nenhum outro estudo aborda a política de dividendos na óptica da incerteza da informação. O estudo foi iniciado por uma revisão de literatura onde foram previamente seleccionadas palavras-chave, correntes de pesquisa e critérios de selecção por forma a abranger o máximo número de artigos possível. Estes são depois restringidos aos mais importantes para a presente pesquisa através dos critérios de selecção, tendo em conta que, na politica de dividendos o estudo se centra apenas na sinalização, assimetria de informação e conflitos de agência e relativamente à incerteza da informação centra-se mais em concreto no efeito que esta tem no valor de um empresa. Após a pesquisa efectuada ...