Audience Costs and Informational Advantage under Effective Brinkmanship Deterrence

Abstract

Previous research on international crisis theory paid much attention to correlations between audience costs and a state's advantage over its opponents in wars. The advantage of generating audience costs is that it makes credible a state's costly signal of its resolve via military threats. However, the plausibility of this argument has been questioned. This study game-theoretically proves that sufficiently high audience costs render the defender's deterrence of the challenger's preferred military invasion ineffective, and therefore do not motivate the challenger to take advantage of information asymmetry about its resolve. Hence, when the challenger's audience costs are sufficiently low, only then does it intend to send a signal of its resolve by raising the invasion distance. Furthermore, if the challenger cannot distinguish the extent of a military invasion in accordance with its resolve, lower audience costs help it carry out a more preferred military invasion by exploiting information superiority. The analyses for both pooling and separating equilibria contradict the claim that generating audience costs brings informational advantage to the challenger in territorial disputes.