Ahmer Tarar

International Bargaining with Two-Sided Domestic Constraints

Putnam revived interest in the “Schelling conjecture” that in international bargaining, a domestic ratification constraint provides a negotiator with a bargaining advantage. However, existing formal analyses of the Schelling conjecture generally allow only one side in the bargaining to be constrained. In this article, a model is analyzed in which both negotiators are constrained. A generalized version of the Schelling conjecture holds that if one negotiators constraint is high and the others is only low or medium, the former gets a better deal than if neither side were constrained, and the latter is worse off. With incomplete information, however, the complete opposite of what the Schelling conjecture predicts can occur, and there is an equilibrium in which delay in reaching an agreement results in both sides being worse off than if neither side were constrained. Incomplete information can but does not always completely eliminate the advantage of having a high constraint.

Prenegotiation Public Commitment in Domestic and International Bargaining

We use a formal bargaining model to examine why, in many domestic and international bargaining situations, one or both negotiators make public statements in front of their constituents committing themselves to obtaining certain benefits in the negotiations. We find that making public commitments provides bargaining leverage, when backing down from such commitments carries domestic political costs. However, when the two negotiators face fairly similar costs for violating a public commitment, a prisoners dilemma is created in which both sides make high public demands which cannot be satisfied, and both negotiators would be better off if they could commit to not making public demands. However, making a public demand is a dominant strategy for each negotiator, and this leads to a suboptimal outcome. Escaping this prisoners dilemma provides a rationale for secret negotiations. Testable hypotheses are derived from the nature of the commitments and agreements made in equilibrium.

Constituencies and Preferences in International Bargaining

Previous formal models of two-level games, which try to determine whether a domestic ratification constraint provides an executive with bargaining leverage in international negotiations, pay little attention to the exact nature of the executives constituency and the source of the constraint. The author uses a gametheoretic model to show that an executive with a national constituency such as a nationally elected president benefits by being constrained. An executive with a constituency distinct from that of the ratifying legislators, however, isworse off under greater constraints, when the constraintscome from constituencies other than his or her own. This can occur, for instance, in a minority or coalition parliamentary government consisting of parties with different and in fact opposing constituencies. Testable hypotheses are derived on the effect of the party composition of the legislature on the executives constraint.

Limited Audience Costs in International Crises

Do audience costs have to be extremely large in order to credibly signal resolve and affect international crises? Existing theoretical work on audience costs suggests an affirmative answer, and recent empirical work on audience costs focuses on whether a leader can generate such large audience costs as to create a commitment to fight where no such commitment previously existed. We analyze a richer crisis bargaining model with audience costs and find that (1) audience costs can have war-reducing effects on incomplete-information crisis bargaining through a noninformative, bargaining-leverage mechanism and (2) audience costs can have war-reducing effects even when such large audience costs are not being generated as to create a commitment to fight where no such commitment previously existed. Even more limited audience costs can have war-reducing effects in international crises. We discuss how the bargaining-leverage mechanism is consistent with a number of prominent historical cases.

Military Mobilization and Commitment Problems

Because of its costliness, military mobilization is generally seen as a mechanism by which high-resolve leaders can credibly signal their high resolve in international crises, thereby possibly overcoming informational asymmetries that can lead to costly and inefficient war. I examine how power-shifts caused by mobilization within a crisis can lead to commitment-problem wars. In a simple ultimatum-offer crisis bargaining model of complete information, war occurs if and only if the power-shift caused by mobilization exceeds the bargaining surplus, which is Powells (2004, 2006) general inefficiency condition for commitment-problem wars. When private information is added, and hence mobilization potentially has a stabilizing signaling role, under certain conditions the commitment problem overwhelms the signaling role and mobilization leads to certain war. Finally, I analyze an infinite-horizon model that captures the reality that mobilizing takes time, and find that commitment-problem wars occur under broader conditions than the general inefficiency condition implies.