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	Crisis Bargaining Game	Bargaining Model of War
Field	International Relations	International Relations
Family	MCDM	MCDM
Year of origin	1994	1995
Originator	Formalized by James Fearon and others (building on Schelling)	James D. Fearon
Type	Extensive-form game of sequential crisis escalation	Formal model of war as bargaining failure
Seminal source	Fearon, J. D. (1994). Domestic political audiences and the escalation of international disputes. American Political Science Review, 88(3), 577–592.	Fearon, J. D. (1995). Rationalist explanations for war. International Organization, 49(3), 379–414.
Aliases	International Crisis Game, Escalation Game, Signaling Game of Crisis Bargaining, Deterrence Crisis Game	Rationalist Explanations for War, Bargaining Theory of War, Crisis Bargaining Model, Fearon Bargaining Model
Related	3	3
Summary	A crisis bargaining game is a formal, usually extensive-form model in which two states sequentially choose to challenge, escalate, stand firm, or back down during an international dispute, and the analyst solves for the equilibrium pattern of escalation and concession. Building on Schelling's strategy of conflict and given an influential treatment in Fearon's (1994) model of escalation as a war of attrition, these games make explicit how incomplete information about each side's resolve, and the costs each pays for backing down, shape whether a crisis ends in mutual accommodation, capitulation, or war.	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.