The use of armed conflict as a bargaining tool against unsophisticated opponents

This paper studies the role of conflict as a bargaining instrument and its impact on dispute termination. We explore an infinite-horizon bargaining game where limited conflicts reveal information about the contenders relative strength. We study the case where the uninformed party learns from battlefield outcomes but does not learn fully from diplomacy. The equilibrium of this bargaining game displays several features observed in real-world disputes. First, convergence in expectations about relative strengths is not suffcient for dispute termination. Second, defeats lead to gambles for resurrection when limited conflicts are not too costly. Finally, disputes display non-monotonic termination probabilities over time.