Alliances in the Shadow of Conflict
43 Pages Posted: 23 Jan 2013
There are 2 versions of this paper
Alliances in the Shadow of Conflict
Date Written: December 14, 2012
Abstract
Victorious alliances often fight about the spoils of war. This paper presents an experiment on the determinants of whether alliances break up and fight internally after having defeated a joint enemy. First, if peaceful sharing yields an asymmetric rent distribution, this increases the likelihood of fighting. In turn, anticipation of the higher likelihood of internal fight reduces the alliance’s ability to succeed against the outside enemy. Second, the option to make non-binding declarations on non-aggression in the relationship between alliance members does not make peaceful settlement within the alliance more likely. Third, higher differences in the alliance players’ contributions to alliance effort lead to more internal conflict and more intense fighting.
Keywords: conflict, contest, alliance, endogenous internal conflict, hold-up problem, non-aggression pact, experiment
JEL Classification: D720, D740
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
Experimental Comparison of Multi-Stage and One-Stage Contests
-
Self-Selection and the Efficiency of Tournaments
By Tor Eriksson, Sabrina Teyssier, ...
-
Can Groups Solve the Problem of Over-Bidding in Contests?
By Roman M. Sheremeta and Jingjing Zhang
-
A Survey of Experimental Research on Contests, All-Pay Auctions and Tournaments
By Emmanuel Dechenaux, Dan Kovenock, ...
-
The Non-Constant-Sum Colonel Blotto Game
By Brian Roberson and Dmitriy Kvasov
-
Entry into Winner-Take-All and Proportional-Prize Contests: An Experimental Study
By Roman M. Sheremeta, Timothy N. Cason, ...
-
Two-Stage Contests with Budget Constraints: An Experimental Study
By James E. Parco, Wilfred Amaldoss, ...