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Taking Sides in Wars of Attrition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2017

ROBERT POWELL
ROBERT POWELL*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
*
Robert Powell is Professor, Travers Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, 210 Barrows Hall, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94708-1150 (RPowell@Berkeley.edu).
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Abstract

Third parties often have a stake in the outcome of a conflict and can affect that outcome by taking sides. This article studies the factors that affect a third party's decision to take sides in a civil or interstate war by adding a third actor to a standard continuous-time war of attrition with two-sided asymmetric information. The third actor has preferences over which of the other two actors wins and for being on the winning side conditional on having taken sides. The third party also gets a flow payoff during the fighting which can be positive when fighting is profitable or negative when fighting is costly. The article makes four main contributions: First, it provides a formal framework for analyzing the effects of endogenous intervention on the duration and outcome of the conflict. Second, it identifies a “boomerang” effect that tends to make alignment decisions unpredictable and coalitions dynamically unstable. Third, it yields several clear comparative-static results. Finally, the formal analysis has implications for empirical efforts to estimate the effects of intervention, showing that there may be significant selection and identification issues.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 111 , Issue 2 , May 2017 , pp. 219 - 236
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2017 

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Footnotes

I am grateful to Ernesto Dal Bó, James Fearon, John Morgan, Santiago Oliveros, Gerard Padro, Jas Sekhon, Leo Simon, and Noam Yuchtman for helpful comments, criticisms, and discussion. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation (SES 1456516).

References

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