This paper shows why states, acting in their own self-interest, may create informational asymmetries that lead to war. In our model, two actors with no private information invest in military capacity before engaging in crisis bargaining. If bargaining fails, the states go to war, and the payoffs of a war depend on the two states' military capacities. We show that the states have incentives to keep each other guessing about their exact levels of capacity -- even though doing so creates the risk of war. Thus, self interest and strategy are to blame for war. Our paper explains two stylized facts: States devote considerable resources to secrecy in the national-security realm, and often disagree about the balance of capabilities.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Princeton University, Research Program in Political Economy in its series Papers with number
03-31-2006.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: ().
Related research
Keywords:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: