Bargaining Model of 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.