Destruction and settlement norms as determinants of conflict: An evolutionary perspective

Abstract

This paper studies conflict in a simple bargaining framework using an evolutionary game-theoretic approach. Our findings suggest that a player does not always regard the winning probability as an acceptable settlement rule. He accepts a division according to winning probability when the destruction caused to him in conflict is more than a threshold, which in turn depends on cost of conflict to the opponent and the size of the population. Further, our analysis shows that the norms with positive weight to disagreement payoff are effective against conflict, and incentivize peace. Contrary to the findings of extant studies carried out in finite population evolutionary game setting, the settlement possibility set is identical under both ESS and Nash equilibrium in our model with settlement norms.