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	Bargaining Model of War	Audience Cost Analysis
Field	International Relations	International Relations
Family	MCDM	MCDM
Year of origin	1995	1994
Originator	James D. Fearon	James D. Fearon
Type	Formal model of war as bargaining failure	Formal signaling mechanism in crisis bargaining
Seminal source	Fearon, J. D. (1995). Rationalist explanations for war. International Organization, 49(3), 379–414.	Fearon, J. D. (1994). Domestic political audiences and the escalation of international disputes. American Political Science Review, 88(3), 577–592.
Aliases	Rationalist Explanations for War, Bargaining Theory of War, Crisis Bargaining Model, Fearon Bargaining Model	Audience Costs Theory, Domestic Audience Cost Model, Tying-Hands Signaling, Audience Cost Mechanism
Related	3	3
Summary	The bargaining model of war, given its canonical statement by James Fearon in 'Rationalist Explanations for War' (1995), treats war not as the failure of reason but as a failure of bargaining. Because fighting is costly and uncertain, there almost always exists a peaceful division of the disputed stakes that both rational states would prefer to the gamble of war. The puzzle, and the model's central contribution, is to identify the specific conditions — private information with incentives to misrepresent, commitment problems, and issue indivisibility — under which rational, unitary states nonetheless fail to reach such a settlement.	Audience cost analysis studies how the domestic political punishment a leader expects for publicly backing down from an international threat makes that threat credible. Introduced formally by James Fearon (1994), the mechanism explains why a leader who escalates a crisis in public ties their own hands: retreating would expose them to costs imposed by domestic audiences for looking weak or incompetent. These accumulating audience costs let states signal resolve, and because democracies can generate larger and more reliable audience costs, the concept underpins prominent arguments about regime type, crisis behavior, and the democratic peace.