A bargaining model of war and peace: Anticipating the onset, duration, and outcome of war

Once wars begin, how and when do they end? While wars can and do end in the military defeat of one side, they also often end in negotiated settlements. Our explanations for war termination, however, have tended to rule out the possibility that diplomacy can continue even after the fighting starts and therefore cannot account for negotiated settlements of war. In this article, we develop a model that allows the disputants to negotiate a settlement not only to prevent a war but to terminate it as well. We focus particularly on private information as a key source of conflict and the revelation of that information as a central component of the process of conflict termination. The model generates several novel and interesting hypotheses related to war outcome and war duration. In addition, since the model also includes the decision to begin a war as well as the decision to continue it, the model suggests several hypotheses related to war onset.