Uncertainty, Information, and Risk in International Technology Races

Nicholas Emery-Xu, Andrew Park and Robert Trager

Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2024, vol. 68, issue 10, 2019-2047

Abstract: A formal model reveals how the information environment affects international races to implement a powerful, dangerous new military technology, which may cause a “disaster†affecting all states. States implementing the technology face a tradeoff between the safety of the technology and performance in the race. States face unknown, private, and public information about capabilities. More decisive races, in which small performance leads produce larger probabilities of victory, are usually more dangerous. In addition, revealing information about rivals’ capabilities has two opposing effects on risk: states discover either that they are far apart in capability and compete less or that they are close in capability and drastically reduce safety to win. Therefore, the public information scenario is less risky than the private information scenario except under high decisiveness. Finally, regardless of information, the larger the eventual loser’s impact on safety relative to the eventual winner’s, the more dangerous is the race.

Keywords: game theory; dyadic conflict; international security; military power; technology race; global catastrophic risk (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00220027231214996 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jocore:v:68:y:2024:i:10:p:2019-2047

DOI: 10.1177/00220027231214996

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Conflict Resolution from Peace Science Society (International)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().