The Role of Rewards in Conflictual International Interactions

Abstract

Models of international conflict often omit the option of offering rewards as a means of exerting influence. The author has developed a revised version of Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman's (1992) international interaction game that allows states either to offer rewards or threaten military force once they have made political demands and their adversary has rejected them. After laying out the game's logic, the author derives predictions about the conditions under which war occurs and rewards are offered and accepted with complete information. The costs of using force, relative military capabilities (i.e., the probability of victory in war), and the value of the rewards drive these predictions. The author also relaxes the complete information assumption and shows how uncertainty can affect the choices of both the maker of the demand and the recipient. Finally, the model is illustrated by applying it to two crises: the United States-Japan crisis leading to the Pearl Harbor attack and the Cuban missile crisis. The variables in the model help to explain both the outbreak of war in the first case and the avoidance of war in the second.