Informational Effects in Conflict Escalation

Constantine Sorokin and Eyal Winter

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: We study a war of attrition in which each party chooses how far to escalate before conceding. If neither concedes before escalation reaches a random disaster threshold, both receive nothing; otherwise the confrontation ends peacefully. When the parties are ex-ante symmetric and their benefits are independent, improving both parties' private information about their own stakes raises both the probability of peace and each party's ex-ante equilibrium utility. The result holds for every nontrivial mean-preserving spread of posterior values---each party's expected benefit from prevailing given its private information. Higher stakes work in the opposite direction: a first-order stochastic increase in posterior values induces greater persistence, lowers the probability of peace, and can reduce both parties' ex-ante utilities. Starting from symmetry, a sufficiently small improvement in only one party's information also promotes peace; its first-order effect is exactly half that of improving both parties' information. At an asymmetric starting point, however, even a small one-sided improvement can instead lower the probability of peace.

Date: 2026-09
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