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Rationalist Experiments on War*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2015

Kai Quek
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Abstract

Private information and the commitment problem are central to the rationalist theory of war, but causal evidence is scarce, as rationalist explanations for war are difficult to test with observational data. I design laboratory experiments to isolate the effects of private information and the commitment problem on the risk of conflict. I find that the commitment problem sharply increases the incidence of conflict, but there is no significant difference in conflict incidence with or without private information in the shadow of shifting power. I also investigate the realism of the positive experimental results with a case study of Japan’s decisionmaking on the eve of the Pacific War. The permutation of formal, experimental and historical methods applies the strength of one method to compensate for the weakness of another. Convergent results from the different methods strengthen the causal inference.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 123 - 142
Copyright
© The European Political Science Association 2015 

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Footnotes

*

Kai Quek, Assistant Professor, Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong ([email protected]). I am grateful to Ernst Fehr, Jim Snyder, Ken Oye and Steve Van Evera for their advice; Adam Berinsky, Lih Feng Cheow, Gabe Lenz, Randall Lewis and Alvin Roth for their thoughts on the design; Nathan Black, Chris Butler, Daina Chiba, Nehemia Geva, Kentaro Hirose, Mike Sances, Meredith Sarkees, David Singer, Gerald Schneider, Dustin Tingley, David Weinberg and participants at MIT workshops and the 2011 Annual Meetings of ASPA, ISA and MPSA for comments on the paper; the Harvard Decision Science Lab for support; the MIT Center for International Studies for funding; and the anonymous reviewers for suggestions. Ernst Fehr and Jim Snyder inspired important refinements in the experimental design. The experiments were approved by the institutional review boards at MIT and Harvard (Protocols 1010004111-2010 and F19862-101). The usual disclaimer applies. To view supplementary material for this article, please visit http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2015.24

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Dataset

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