How Moderately Resolute States Extract Concessions in Crises

What The Paper Asks

Noam Reich develops a new theory—dynamic screening—to explain how states behave and how rivals infer resolve during international crises. The paper asks how long governments will endure costly diplomacy, invest in sunk costs and audience costs, and when those investments lead to war, concession, or stalemate.

Theoretical Approach

Reich models crisis diplomacy as a war-of-attrition game in which states differ in intrinsic resolve. The model treats negotiation as a dynamic process: leaders choose how long to persist in costly bargaining, whether to pay sunk costs (investments that cannot be recovered), and how these choices build audience costs (domestic political penalties for backing down). The analysis is purely theoretical and uses game-theoretic modeling to derive equilibrium behavior.

Key Findings

• Highly resolved states are more impatient with diplomacy: they prefer to fight sooner rather than prolong negotiations.
• The least resolved states tend to concede quickly to avoid the costs of fighting.
• Moderately resolved states negotiate the longest, incur larger sunk costs, and accumulate the most audience costs.
• Because moderately resolved states grant rivals more time to decide, they are paradoxically more likely to obtain concessions—not because others update credibly on their resolve, but because their patience increases the chance the opponent will concede.
• The model also produces stalemated negotiations as a natural equilibrium outcome, offering microfoundations for a commonly observed crisis result.

Why This Matters

The dynamic screening framework reframes common assumptions about signaling and audience costs in crisis bargaining: the observed correlation between costly escalation and success may reflect strategic timing rather than stronger private resolve. The theory has clear implications for how scholars should interpret observable investments (troop movements, public threats, prolonged diplomacy) and for empirical strategies that attempt to measure state resolve.

Directions For Future Work

Reich's formal results suggest testable implications for case analyses and quantitative work on crisis duration, concession timing, and the domestic politics of backing down, by linking observed bargaining patience to bargaining outcomes rather than to a straightforward signal of commitment.