How Do States Negotiate?

Abstract

This dissertation is comprised of three separate essays. The first two explore how states cope with uncertainty in international crises that can lead to war. The third essay studies gang conflict. In "Signaling Strength with Handicaps," I introduce a novel class of signals for communicating strength. I argue that states can signal strength by handicapping themselves, deliberately reducing their combat effectiveness. In an ultimatum crisis bargaining model, I show that strong states can use handicaps to reduce the risk of war. The key to this result is a comparative advantage that allows stronger types to fight more effectively with handicaps. This allows for an equilibrium where (1) stronger states adopt larger handicaps, (2) larger handicaps are more likely to deter the receiver, and (3) the positive risk of war precludes weaker types from imitating the handicap signal. In "Dynamic Screening in International Crises," I argue that the amount of time and effort that states invest in diplomacy is a function of their resolve. A state that finds war an attractive option will escalate the crisis earlier. By contrast, a state that considers the threat of war to be particularly detrimental will accept less risk and concede before their rival can declare war. Modeling a crisis as a war of attrition, I show that the amount of delay that a state is willing to tolerate in a crisis serves as a key source of information about its resolve. This presents a powerful alternative to conventional signaling models and generates divergent predictions about states' behavior. In "Gunshots and Turf Wars: Inferring Gang Territories from Administrative Data" (joint with Brendan Cooley), we study street gangs. Though conjectured to engage in territorial conflict, the covert nature makes them difficult to study. The number of gangs operating in a city and the division of territory between them are unobserved. We develop a method that exploits spatial patterns in violence to recover these parameters. We apply our method to study gang competition in Chicago using victim-based crime reports from the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and validate our methodology using gang territorial maps produced by the CPD.