Journal of Conflict Resolution

Although economic sanctions have been quite frequent in the twentieth century, a close examination of the low success rate (33 out of 83 cases) indicates that sender countries are not able to select the appropriate cases. Moreover, analysts sometimes offer contradictory advice for such selection. This article provides a game-theoretic explanation of these phenomena. Six different game-theoretic scenarios lead to the same equilibrium outcome. This is a mixed strategy equilibrium. The success ratio is the outcome of the selection of mixed strategies by both sender and receiver countries. Under a wide range of (specified) circumstances, the size of the sanction has no impact upon the behavior of the target country. Finally, some empirical implications of the game-theoretic analysis are compared to existing empirical generalizations, and further implications for empirical research are discussed.

This article uses the utility functions from Richardson arms rivalry (R-AR) models to help determine the equilibrium outcomes of 2 × 2 game-theory arms rivalry (GT-AR) models. Three different formulations of a R-AR, one general and two specific, are employed. Four different formulations of a GT-AR, a PD arms rivalry (PD-AR), a Chicken arms rivalry (Chicken-AR), a Deadlock arms rivalry (Deadlock-AR), and a Stag Hunt arms rivalry (Stag Hunt-AR), are also used. I first establish the most general possible restrictions on Richardson-type utility functions that determine the four common 2 × 2 arms rivalry games. I then establish two counterintuitive results: One of the specific formulations of a R-AR may help imply the equilibrium outcomes of a PD- or Deadlock-AR but is inconsistent with the equilibrium outcomes of a Chicken- or Stag Hunt-AR; it is impossible for either specific formulation of a R-AR to ever yield the equilibrium outcome of a Stag Hunt-AR.

This study seeks to uncover what causes a Third World country to begin to produce arms, why some Third World countries produce more weapons than others, and the potential consequences of this production. The findings suggest that a Third World country with a large economy, which has achieved a comparatively advanced role in the world economy and which at one time or another has suffered from an arms embargo, is very likely to be producing a relatively large amount of military weaponry. Within each Third World region a few states are now engaging in arms production to pursue upward political, military, and economic mobility. Given that historically the interstate hierarchy has been maintained, in part, through a monopoly over the means of destruction, indigenous Third World arms production may have wide-ranging consequences for the international system. Indeed, this study concludes that Third World arms production could begin to undermine the military hierarchy of the interstate system.

This study evaluates the importance of accurately modeling strategic threats in complex multilateral conflict-of-interest decision problems. The objective is to improve prescriptive accuracy when cooperative n-person game theory is applied to the analysis of such problems. A competitive experiment compares the von Neumann-Morgenstern characteristic function v and Harsanyi function H in terms of descriptive accuracy. Results indicate that H is significantly more accurate than v. This suggests that strategic threats may be an important factor in modeling cooperative games.

There are differences between what the United States says and does with regard to strategic arms. There are also differences between policies that are ideal from a uniquely U.S. perspective and from a broader alliance perspective. These two sets of differences correspond to one another; the latter help to explain the former. Furthermore, recent discussions of arms reduction options, such as Nalebuff (1988), fail to consider the differences between national and alliance points of view. Arguments for minimal deterrence do not account for the damaging effects on alliance relations. A clear understanding of the different perspectives, which consequently pull U.S. policy in different directions, is necessary to see the genuine merits of various options under discussion for future agreements. American alliance commitments help to explain the divergence.

We employ vector autoregression to test for direct Granger causality among state entrepreneurship, foreign investment, export expansion, and economic growth in Taiwan. We infer hypotheses about the relationships among these variables from the developmentalist, dependency, and statist perspectives, which suggest varied and often contradictory expectations about the presence or absence, and about the sign and direction of causality among these variables. We found that Taiwan is a unique case and differs from the findings reported in previous research on Brazil and Ireland. The island's state entrepreneurship has been “Granger caused” by its own recent history as well as the recent history of GNP performance. In turn, state entrepreneurship has had a causal impact on export expansion. But state entrepreneurship has not been influenced by and has not influenced either economic growth or foreign investment. In addition to state entrepreneurship, foreign investment and economic growth have affected Taiwan's export expansion. The inflow of foreign investment has been caused by both endogenous (that is, this variable's own recent history) and exogenous (Taiwan's past export successes) sources. All other suspected causal linkages fail to be substantiated by our analysis. Accordingly, state entrepreneurship has evidently acted as a key nexus in the operation of the internal, but not external, market forces in Taiwan, thus supporting and contradicting central arguments of all three perspectives on political economy.

One criterion for evaluating a nation's military structure is its impact on crisis stability. This article presents a model to capture the process of interacting expectations that determines whether initial suspicions are sufficient to cause one or both nations to strike rather than wait during a crisis. The model can be used to assess the impact on crisis stability of specific changes in military structure. For example, the impact of a population defense depends on whether it is “thin,”“thick,” or “brick.” Also, the verification requirements of an offensive weapons arms control agreement affect crisis stability.

This article develops an asymmetric information model of final-offer arbitration. If the union negotiator has superior information about the bargaining environment, then the union rank and file may find it in their best interest to require their negotiator to go to arbitration some of the time. In a simple two-state model, it is shown that if arbitration is rational for the union rank and file, it will occur only in the state where the bargaining environment is unfavorable to the union.