Behavioral Foundations of Conflict Resolution

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Gerald Eisenkopf
• Subject Area: Economic Policy, Applied Economics ; Political Science
• Term: from 2014 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 260088459

The project aims to provide a better understanding of conflict behavior and in particular conflict prevention and resolution. By using carefully designed economic experiments the projects focuses on the identification of specific facets of conflict behavior that are hard to identify outside a laboratory. The project will therefore provide complementary evidence to the multiple empirical studies that use field data. The project relies on three economic experiments that study conflict behavior and resolution mechanisms in different ways. In all experiments the conflict game uses variations of the Tullock (1980) 2 player rent seeking model in which the players compete for a fixed prize. Both can invest resources into this contest and their probability of winning the prize is determined by the relative size of their investments. The resources invested into the contest are sunk costs and thus every investment unambiguously decreases overall efficiency. A great number of experimental studies has used this game to study conflict behavior and the two most robust findings are that investment levels strongly exceed the standard Nash equilibrium prediction and that there is great heterogeneity in investment levels between subjects. The first experiment separates armament and conflict initiation in the Tullock contest . This is the first experiment that studies this distinction even though the separation of the decisions ius a crucial featuer in many actual conflicts. The experimental treatments vary the information about the armament of the other conflict party and the distribution of the prize. The second experiment studies the intertemporal impact of conflict intervention. Each player interacts with the same opponent for 50 rounds in a Tullock Contest. The proposed experimental treatments vary whether, when, and how a third party intervenes in a conflict. The project addresses another shortcoming in the relevant literature. Previous contributions only study intervention mechanisms that kick in when the experiment and the embedded conflict starts. Hence these interventions are rather preventive actions. The third experiment addresses frequent observations from the field that rent-seeking elites play a crucial role for the intensity of conflicts between groups. In the experiment groups of two players compete against each other. Within each group only one player (the "soldier") makes any conflict expenditure while the other player (the "elite") benefits from this expenditure in case of success. The experimental treatments vary the coercive potential of the elite player and the resources of an intervening third party.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants