Taking Sides in Wars of Attrition

Abstract

Third parties often have a stake in the outcome of a conflict and can affect that outcome by taking sides. This article studies the factors that affect a third party's decision to take sides in a civil or interstate war by adding a third actor to a standard continuous-time war of attrition with two-sided asymmetric information. The third actor has preferences over which of the other two actors wins and for being on the winning side conditional on having taken sides. The third party also gets a flow payoff during the fighting which can be positive when fighting is profitable or negative when fighting is costly. The article makes four main contributions: First, it provides a formal framework for analyzing the effects of endogenous intervention on the duration and outcome of the conflict. Second, it identifies a “boomerang” effect that tends to make alignment decisions unpredictable and coalitions dynamically unstable. Third, it yields several clear comparative-static results. Finally, the formal analysis has implications for empirical efforts to estimate the effects of intervention, showing that there may be significant selection and identification issues.