Expected Utility Model of War

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.