Crisis Bargaining Game

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.