War Of Attrition Research Articles

„Мельпомена” Геродота як джерело з міжнародної та військової історії Північного Причорномор’я в VI ст. до н. е.

The article considers the peculiarities of the existence of a regional international order in the northern Black Sea region during the Scythian rule based on the analysis of the fourth volume of the work „History”, entitled „Melpomene” by the ancient Greek historian and writer Herodotus. Emphasis is placed on the coverage of the causes, course and results of the Persian king Darius I in Scythia described in the treatise in 513 B. C. As a result of the study, the author concludes that the fourth chapter of Herodotus' „History” of Melpomene allows us to shed light on the ancient international order that existed on the steppe outskirts of the ancient world, where Scythian tribes ruled during the period under study. Among the aspects considered by the author and useful from the point of view of research of the chosen problem, there are features of mutual relations between Scythians and their allies – Greeks. Based on the testimony of Herodotus, we can conclude that during the intensification of contradictions with the Persian Empire of the Achaemenids in the VI century B.C. and the beginning of the military conflict with it, relations between Greece and Scythia move to a new, qualitative level. There is, in fact, a deepening of relations to the level of military-political alliance directed against the Persian king Darius I. There is also evidence of local Scythian allies – neighbors, some of whom refused to help them in the fight against the Persians, some – supported. Support for the latter, not only allowed to increase the army, but also allowed to wage a war of attrition, which provided for constant retreat, including in the territory of the Allies. It can be concluded that due to effective allied cooperation with local tribes, the Scythians succeeded in the main strategic task of this war – to create a threat to the bridge over the river Istra. This circumstance, which posed a risk for Darius to be cut off from his Caucasian possessions, forced the Persian ruler to retreat.

The influence of political fragmentation on public enterprises: Evidence from German municipalities

This study investigates the influence of politically fragmented municipal councils on the investment behaviour of municipally owned public enterprises. We argue that common public choice theories can also be applied to public enterprises. For our observation period (2002–2014), we use a data set encompassing 8,685 municipally owned enterprises subject to commercial accounting located in 3,237 municipalities drawn from all 13 German federal area states. On average, our results point to a negative effect of fragmentation on investment per capita, supporting a war of attrition or veto player approach. Effects are heterogeneous among different sectors, possibly due to higher visibility to voters. Thus, veto players might actively try to block prestigious and publicly perceivable investment projects to hinder their opponents. Political budget cycles additionally influence this effect for some sectors. However, testing non-linearities reveal that the common-pool hypothesis cannot be completely ruled out.

Costly Preparations in Bargaining*

AbstractWe model costly preparations in negotiations and study their effect on agreements in a bilateral bargaining game. In our model, players bargain over a unit pie, where each player needs to pay a fixed cost in the beginning of every period t, if he wants to stay in the game in period t+1 in case a deal has not been reached by the end of t. Whether a player has paid this cost (i.e., prepared for negotiations in t+1) is his private information. If only player i stops paying, then player j receives the entire pie. We characterize a “war of attrition” equilibrium, which is a symmetric equilibrium. We do not know whether the game has other symmetric equilibria, but we show that if such an equilibrium exists, its payoff converges to zero as the frictions (discounting and preparation cost) vanish. Efficiency can be obtained by asymmetric play. Specifically, with asymmetric strategies every Pareto‐efficient payoff vector can be approximated in equilibrium, provided that the cost of preparations is sufficiently small and that the discount factor is sufficiently close to one.

Agricultural Fire or Arson?

This article focuses on fire management practices in Algeria during the colonial period. Focusing on environmental usages of fires in Algerian rural society, this article shows that these practices were submitted to varied and opposite interpretations resulting in significant and durable conflicts. These conflicts exploded under the French colonial forestry administration, which forcefully imposed new legislation to criminalize existing agricultural practices, including fires. Despite this ban, these practices continued. The administration interpreted this persistence as rebellion and responded with severe sanctions. This only aggravated the situation, resulting in a real war of attrition. On the one hand, this situation does not diverge from the rural violence typical of the nineteenth century. On the other, the responses of the administration in colonial Algeria represent specific digressions compared to the policies carried out in metropolitan areas.

NIMBY (not in my backyard) conflicts: a simple game-theoretic analysis

This study addresses so-called NIMBY (not in my backyard) conflicts around the siting of a facility that produces local public goods/services for the residents of one region but transfers the environmental costs to surrounding areas (subregions). Residents usually agree on the need for such a NIMBY facility but oppose its construction in their neighborhood, making the siting of the facility difficult. Assuming a region with a local government and two areas having one resident each, we formulate a two-person normal form game in which the government sites a new NIMBY facility in either of the two areas while considering the residents’ opinions on the most suitable site for the facility. Our analysis shows that in such a game, residents experience either the Prisoner’s Dilemma or War of Attrition, leading to the emergence of NIMBY conflicts.

War of Attrition with Incomplete Information and Fuzzy Players' Types

The result on existence of a pure-strategy symmetric Bayesian Nash equilibrium in the war of attrition is generalized for fuzzy players’ actions and types.

Do physically stronger males prevail in non-physical conflicts?

Among non-human animals, a key strategy to resolve conflicts without fighting relies on assessing relative fighting ability on the basis of physical cues such as size and strength. Recent studies hypothesize that the human mind also contains mechanisms for spontaneously coordinating conflict behavior on the basis of difference in physical strength, even if strength is not rationally relevant to the conflict. We provide the first direct, experimental test of the existence of such mechanisms. We do so by applying a non-physical, anonymous, economic game - the war of attrition - in which male contestants compete by means of perseverance to win a monetary prize. While initial studies provided some support for the prediction, the final well-powered and pre-registered study failed to support the prediction. Overall, we interpret our findings as evidence against the hypothesis that the human mind attributes relevance to physical factors that are irrelevant for the actual resolution of a conflict. We discuss implications for existing findings in the field and provide directions for further research.

A war of attrition against antibiotic resistance: Current strategies try to keep antibiotic resistance at bay and further encourage research to produce genuinely novel antibacterials.

To fight antibiotic resistance, novel drugs are urgently needed. Regulatory agencies are addressing the economic problems and offer new incentives for developing new antibiotics.

Integer game with delay

In this note, we study a version of a war of attrition, in which the players pick delays and the player with the longest delay wins. Unlike the war of attrition, all players have to experience the longest delay before the consumption takes place. We show that the game has no mixed strategy Nash equilibria. The game can be seen as a re-interpretation of the integer game, which is one of the most important and most criticized constructions in the full implementation literature. Unlike the integer game, it has a well-defined best response against any mixed strategy.

The World of Wars: Risky Systems – A second-order observation of future wars

The world of the future will not be one without wars. The many hopes we have about a future peace governed by a more or less confederal state will not make wars obsolete. Regular wars and irregular wars will continue and probably on different subjects than we are used to. The article proposes that the form of war will be more about temporalities, i.e. fast interchanges or, rather, more risky protracted wars of attrition and exhaustion and less on tactical well defined territories. The West can neither dominate such wars nor establish one world that is ruled or even governed. The risk is that we have the systems we have. They have their own path dependencies, their temporal bindings and their own stories to tell. In the worst case, the West sticks to an imaginary of almighty power – and then it will lose. We tend to forget that our present past will be experienced and told differently in the future. The “extreme 20th century” will have another history and another impact. Its extremes will be narrated as more extreme, and its temporal bindings become easier to observe. The much celebrated “revolutions in military affairs” will not dominate future war systems. Unipolarity is fading away. Kantian convergences may appear.

Learning and payoff externalities in an investment game

This paper examines the interplay of informational and payoff externalities in a two-player irreversible investment game. Each player learns about the quality of his project by observing a private signal and the action of his opponent. I characterize the unique symmetric equilibrium in a timing game that features a second-mover advantage, allowing for arbitrary correlation in project qualities. Despite private learning, the game reduces to a stochastic war of attrition. In contrast to the case of purely informational externalities, all investments happen at the same real time instant—irrespective of the sign of the correlation—and beliefs never get trapped in a no-learning region, provided that the second-mover advantage is sufficiently high.

Loss aversion and sunk cost sensitivity in all-pay auctions for charity: Theory and experiments

This paper theoretically and experimentally studies the role of two behavioral biases in all-pay auctions for charity. The theory is developed to predict the effect of loss aversion in the first-price all-pay auction and sunk cost sensitivity in the war of attrition. Using controlled laboratory experiments, auction treatments are designed to test for the presence of these biases. In support of the theory, the results indicate that revenues in incremental bidding mechanisms such as the war of attrition rely on bidders who are sunk cost sensitive. It is shown that this behavioral response can be curbed significantly with a commitment device. Likewise, the results of the experimental first-price all-pay auctions find evidence of loss aversion, which reduces bidders’ average bid. These findings help explain the inconsistencies in revenues from previous all-pay auction studies and indicate a mechanism preference based on the distribution of these behavioral characteristics.

Dynamic Inspection and the Value of Information

This paper analyses a dynamic inspection game between a principal and agent where the agent has private information about his binary type. The principal strictly prefers employing the high type to his outside option, and the outside option to the low type. Every period, the agent can either exert effort or shirk, and the principal can monitor the agent's actions at a cost. The high type never shirks, while low types find effort costly. Monitoring provides a tool for learning about the agent's type. I show that the game generically has a unique equilibrium akin to a war of attrition between the principal and the low type. My main result is that monitoring provides valuable information for the principal if and only if he is sufficiently pessimistic about the agent's type. The probability of monitoring decreases as the agent's reputation grows. Eventually, either the low type is caught and fired, or the principal trusts the agent enough that monitoring ends forever.

The Effects of Loss Aversion and Sunk Cost Sensitivity in All-Pay Auctions for Charity

All-pay auctions have demonstrated an extraordinary ability at raising money for charity. One mechanism in particular is the war of attrition, which frequently generates revenue well beyond what is theoretically predicted with rational bidders. However, what motivates the behavioral response in bidders remains unclear. By imposing charity auction incentives in the laboratory, this paper uses controlled experiments to consider the effects of loss aversion and sunk cost sensitivity on bidders’ willingness to contribute. The results indicate that revenues in incremental bidding mechanisms, such as the war of attrition, rely heavily on bidders who are sunk cost sensitive. It is shown this behavioral response can be easily curbed with a commitment device which drastically lowers contributions below theoretical predictions. A separate behavioral response due to loss aversion is found in the sealed-bid first-price all-pay auction, which reduces bidders’ willingness to contribute. These findings help explain the inconsistencies in revenues from previous all-pay auction studies and indicate a mechanism preference based on the distribution of these behavioral characteristics.

Voting as a war of attrition

We study communication in committees selecting one of two alternatives when consensus is required and agents have private information about their preferences. Delaying the decision is costly, so a form of multiplayer war of attrition emerges. Waiting allows voters to express the intensity of their preferences and may help to select the alternative correctly more often than simple majority. In a series of laboratory experiments, we investigate how various rules affect the outcome reached. We vary the amount of feedback and the communication protocol available to voters: complete secrecy about the pattern of support; feedback about this support; public communication; and within-group communication. The feedback no-communication mechanism is worse than no feedback benchmark in all measures of welfare—the efficient alternative is chosen less often, waiting cost is higher, and thus net welfare is lower. Our headline result is that adding communication restores net efficiency, but in different ways. Public communication does poorly in terms of selecting the correct alternative, but limits the cost of delay, while group communication improves allocative efficiency, but has at best a moderate effect on delay.

Brexit, the Belfast Agreement and Northern Ireland: Imperilling a Fragile Political Bargain

AbstractThe major impact of the Belfast Agreement was to engineer a peaceful coexistence between nationalism and unionism that involved each bloc recognising it had sufficient power to thwart the political ambitions of the other side, but not enough to push through its own agenda. This paper argues that Brexit seriously damages this peaceful coexistence and could trigger what is termed an Ulster war of attrition in which Northern Ireland becomes entrapped in a political stalemate where each side strives to triumph without having sufficient power to do so. It also argues that to restore internal political stability in Northern Ireland, and to indemnify against the risk of disorderly relationships between the British and Irish governments in the future, the strategic importance of Strand 3 of the Belfast Agreement requires strengthening.

Non-organized boycott: alliance advantage and free riding incentives in uneven wars of attrition

We study non-organized boycott activities. We develop a boycott model where multiple consumers on the demand side fight against a misbehaved monopolist on the supply side. The goal of the boycott is to force the firm that lacks corporate social responsibility to change its behavior, for example, abandon polluting production technology towards environmentally friendly actions. We analyze consumers’ and firm’s incentives and equilibrium strategies. Our paper describes the difficulty of winning a non-organized boycott in reality. We find that consumers’ free riding incentives limit the real boycott power even when the benefits to free ride is small. The larger the market the firm serves, the more likely an individual consumer would stop boycotting (who acts as a strict environmentalist), which leaves fewer boycotters remaining in the costly conflict (who act as loyal supporters of the product). On the other hand, we show that the market size does not significantly affect the firm’s strategies. For a big firm, the consumer boycott will surely be effective, that is, lead to non-zero boycotter participation, but hardly successful, that is, not lead to the firm’s cessation of misbehavior.

Payback without bookkeeping: The origins of revenge and retaliation

ABSTRACT Current evolutionary models of revenge focus on its complex deterrent functions. Nevertheless, there are some retaliatory behaviors in nonhuman animals that do not appear to have a deterrent function and that are notably similar to revenge in their motivational structure. I propose a novel explanation for the origin of revenge motives that does not rely on deterrence, and I argue that revenge motives as understood on this model could easily be co-opted to serve subsequent functions of deterrence. This explanation appeals to a well-understood family of game-theoretic models known as the ‘war of attrition.’ One theoretical implication concerns the starting point for evolutionary psychology. Starting with an understanding of how human adaptations might have arisen from more ancient mechanisms and selection pressures provides helpful constraints and correctives.

Equilibrium in a war of attrition with an option to fight decisively

We develop a symmetric incomplete-information continuous-time two-player war-of-attrition game with an option to fight decisively. We show that there exists an essentially unique symmetric Bayesian Nash equilibrium. Under equilibrium, the game does not end immediately, and a costly delay persists even with the availability of the fighting option that ends the game if chosen. In addition, there exists a critical time in which a fight occurs unless a player resigns before that time.

Second-Price All-Pay Auctions and Best-Reply Matching Equilibria

The paper studies second-price all-pay auctions — wars of attrition — in a new way, based on classroom experiments and Kosfeld et al.’s best-reply matching (BRM) equilibrium. Two players fight over a prize of value [Formula: see text], and submit bids not exceeding a budget [Formula: see text]; both pay the lowest bid and the prize goes to the highest bidder. The behavior probability distributions in the classroom experiments are strikingly different from the mixed Nash equilibrium (NE). They fit with BRM and generalized best-reply matching (GBRM), an ordinal logic according to which, if bid A is the best response to bid B, then A is played as often as B. The paper goes into the GBRM logic, highlights the role of focal values and discusses the high or low payoffs this logic can lead to.