Do States Play Signaling Games?

Abstract

The study of international conflict and cooperation has long drawn on game theory for insights. Recent developments have made the assumptions of game theory more realistic. Particularly important is the development of signaling games, which analyze situations when decision-makers lack complete information about their environment. Signaling game logic has been applied to many areas of international politics in the past decade, including decisions to go to war, crisis bargaining, international economic negotiations, regional integration, and the foreign policies of democratic states. The signaling games approach assumes that states are unitary actors with a single preference ordering and set of beliefs. I relax this assumption by developing an informal model in which decision-makers can hold different prior beliefs and preferences, and investigate this model's usefulness by analyzing how the United States responded to the more cooperative foreign policy signals initiated by the Soviet Union under Gorbachev. This step further deepens the realism of game-theoretic applications to foreign policy by explaining how political conflict among domestic actors influences foreign policy choices.