Endogenizing Conflict Initiation: Flinching and Fighting at Global High Noon

In many political processes, the order of actions often has as much impact on the final outcome as do the actions themselves. Problems of actor order are neither clearly visible nor well understood in international conflict, but they do exist and are important. A new model is presented, based on Bueno de Mesquita & Lalman’s ‘international interaction game’, that allows the actors to choose strategically who will initiate demands and, subsequently, who will initiate conflict. Adopting the same preference restrictions as were employed for the international interaction game, the equilibrium conditions for status quo and for negotiation are found to be the same for the new game as for the old. The equilibrium conditions for war and for acquiescence by an actor (i.e. giving in to the other’s demands) are found to be different between games; propositions for these equilibrium conditions are given. Concerning war, for all cases of war predicted by the original model, reversing the actor order produces a quizzical prediction in which the previous war initiator now acquiesces. For empirical cases of directed dyads, this produces two rather different predictions. Given a random pairing of states in an undirected dyad, the new model produces a single prediction of either war or acquiescence. In addition, some cases that were predicted to lead to an actor’s acquiescence under the original model are now cases predicted to lead to war, given endogenous demand initiation.