Research Projects

This article develops a new theory of how a strong target regime can (partially) deter a sender from imposing sanctions over major issues. We develop a formal theoretic framework to show that, following a sender's sanction threat, a strong target regime can signal its strength by deliberately weakening itself through always sharing power with a domestic opposition, while a weak target regime mixes between sharing and not sharing power with the opposition. The strategy offers the sender a better assessment of a target's strength, enabling it to adjust its sanction policy accordingly and avoid the costs of a potentially ineffective sanction over a strong target regime. As a result, a strong target regime will be sanctioned with a lower probability than a weak one.

These days many governments employ scoring auctions---an auction format where bidders submit a pair of price and quality. Its goal is to achieve a high-quality procurement, even at the expense of a higher price. In this paper, we theoretically confirm this trade-off. We compare scoring auctions to more traditional auctions where the auctioneer first chooses a quality optimally, and then bidders submit prices. Our main result identifies conditions for which scoring auctions yield higher quality but at a higher price.

This paper studies the conduct of war. We introduce the idea that one of the adversaries has a single potentially decisive strategic or tactical option (one-time advantage) and they must decide whether and when to use it. We illustrate in a war of attrition setting with one-sided incomplete information that countries do not necessarily use their one-time advantage as soon as possible, and show the existence of equilibria where strong countries always withhold to signal strength. We differentiate between three cases and find that weak countries typically use the one-time advantage in the first period. The only case in which they withhold in the first period and use it later is when the uninformed country expects to be defeated by a strong adversary earlier than expected to defeat a weak adversary. The paper also demonstrates that in the presence of signaling incentives in military strategy, the battlefield might no longer serve as a reliable indicator of relative strength, which has implications for war duration. To illustrate the main logic of our model, we analyze Germany's decision to employ unrestricted submarine warfare during World War I. 

    This paper builds on work in economic theory to create a context-specific model that provides new insights into governments' decisions to invest in reputation building. In a two-period model where a government faces two potential challengers sequentially, we identify the threat of elimination as a novel mechanism that drastically changes the governments' incentives: when the danger of elimination is sufficiently high, governments forego the possibility of investing in reputation building even in cases where existing models would predict doing so. The paper also contributes to the empirical debate about the importance of future stakes and future challengers. Our results broadly confirm Walter's (2006) findings that the higher the future stakes and future number of challengers, the more likely it is to observe reputation building. We illustrate in a case study that an increase in the danger of elimination changed the Habsburg leadership's attitude towards Hungarian autonomy demands in the 1860s.