Compare methods

	Bargaining Model of War	Expected Utility Model of War
Field	International Relations	International Relations
Family	MCDM	MCDM
Year of origin	1995	1981
Originator	James D. Fearon	Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
Type	Formal model of war as bargaining failure	Formal rational-choice model of conflict initiation
Seminal source	Fearon, J. D. (1995). Rationalist explanations for war. International Organization, 49(3), 379–414.	Bueno de Mesquita, B. (1981). The War Trap. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Aliases	Rationalist Explanations for War, Bargaining Theory of War, Crisis Bargaining Model, Fearon Bargaining Model	Expected Utility Theory of War, The War Trap Model, Rational Choice Model of War Initiation, Expected-Utility Conflict Model
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.	The expected utility model of war, introduced by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita in The War Trap (1981), treats the decision to initiate international conflict as a rational gamble. A leader is modeled as comparing the utility of the outcome they could win against the utility of the outcome they could lose, each weighted by the probability of winning or losing, and is predicted to challenge another state only when this expected utility is positive. It was among the first attempts to derive testable predictions about war initiation from explicit assumptions of rational, utility-maximizing decision making.