Hostname: page-component-6bf8c574d5-685pp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-03-09T16:21:45.007Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Inefficient Use of Power: Costly Conflict with Complete Information

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 June 2004

ROBERT POWELL
ROBERT POWELL
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Recent work across a wide range of issues in political economy as well as in American, comparative, and international politics tries to explain the inefficient use of power—revolutions, civil wars, high levels of public debt, international conflict, and costly policy insulation—in terms of commitment problems. This paper shows that a common mechanism is at work in a number of these diverse studies. This common mechanism provides a more general formulation of a type of commitment problem that can arise in many different substantive settings. The present analysis then formalizes this mechanism as an “inefficiency condition” that ensures that all of the equilibria of a stochastic game are inefficient. This condition has a natural substantive interpretation: Large, rapid changes in the actors' relative power (measured in terms of their minmax payoffs) may cause inefficiency.

Type
ARTICLES
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 98 , Issue 2 , May 2004 , pp. 231 - 241
Copyright
© 2004 by the American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Acemoglu Daron, and James A. Robinson. 2000. “Why Did the West Extend the Franchise.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 115 (November): 1167– 99.Google Scholar
Acemoglu Daron, and James Robinson. 2001. “A Theory of Political Transitions.” American Economic Review 91 (September): 938– 63.Google Scholar
Alesina Alberto, and Guido Tabellini. 1990. “A Positive Theory of Fiscal Deficits and Government Debt.” Review of Economic Studies 57 (July): 403– 14.Google Scholar
Anderlini Luca, and Leonardo Felli. 2001. “Costly Bargaining and Renogiation,” Econometrica 69 (March): 377– 411.Google Scholar
Ausubel Lawrence, Peter Cramton, and Raymond Deneckere. 2002. “Bargaining in Incomplete Information.” In Handbook of Game Theory, ed. Robert J. Aumann and Sergiu Hart. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science B.V., Vol. 3.
Besley Timothy, and Stephen Coate. 1998. “Sources of Inefficiency in a Representative Democracy.” American Economic Review 88 (March): 139– 56.Google Scholar
Busch Lutz-Alexander, and Quan Wen. 1995. “Perfect Equilibria in a Negotiation Model.” Econometrica 63 (May): 545– 65.Google Scholar
de Figueiredo Rui. 2003. “Endogenous Budget Insitutions and Political Insulation: Why States Adopt the Item Veto.” Journal of Public Economics. 87 (December): 1967– 83.Google Scholar
de Figueiredo Rui. 2002. “Electoral Competition, Political Uncertainty, and Policy Insulation.” American Political Science Review 96 (June): 321– 35.Google Scholar
de Figueiredo Rui, and Richard Vanden Bergh. 2001. “Protecting the Weak: Why (and When) States Adopt an Administrative Procedure Act.” Manuscript. Haas School of Business, U.C. Berkeley.
Fearon James D. 1995. “Rationalist Explanations for War.” International Organization 39 (Summer): 379– 414.Google Scholar
Fearon James D. 1998. “Commitment Problems and the Spread of Ethnic Conflict.” In The International Spread of Ethnic Conflict, ed. David A. Lake and Donald Rothchild. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Fearon James. 2003. “Why Do Some Civil Wars Last So Long?” Journal of Peace Research (forthcoming). Stanford.Google Scholar
Fearon James D., and David Laitin. 2003. “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War.” American Political Science Review 97 (February): 75– 90.Google Scholar
Fernandez Raquel, and Jacob Glazer. 1991. “Striking for a Bargain Between Two Completely Informed Agents.” American Economic Review 81 (March): 240– 52.Google Scholar
Friedman James. 1986. Game Theory with Applications to Economics. New York: Oxford.
Fudenberg Drew, and Eric Maskin. 1986. “The Folk Theorem in Repeated Games with Discounting and Incomplete Information.” Econometrica 54 (May): 533– 56.Google Scholar
Merlo Antonio, and Charles Wilson. 1995. “A Stochastic Model of Sequential Bargaining with Complete Information.” Econometrica 63 (March): 371– 99.Google Scholar
Moe Terry. 1990. “The Politics of Structural Choice: Towards a Theory of Public Bureaucracy.” In Organization Theory from Chester Barnard to the Present and Beyond, ed., Oliver E. Williamson. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Muthoo Abhinay. 1999. Bargaining Theory with Applications. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Persson Thorsten, and Lars Svensson. 1989. “Why a Stubborn Conservative Would Run a Deficit: Policy with Time-Inconsistent Preferences.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 104 (May): 325– 45.Google Scholar
Powell Robert. 1999. In the Shadow of Power. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Powell Robert. 2002. ”Bargaining Theory and International Conflict.” Annual Review of Political Science, Vol. 5. Palo Alto, CA: Annual Reviews.Google Scholar
Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.