de Mesquita: The War Trap Revisited

de Mesquita, B., 1985. The War Trap Revisited: A Revised Expected Utility Model.”. The American Political Science Review, 79(1), 156-177.

“An expected utility approach to the study of international politics offers both the opportunity to deduce propositions about international conflict, and, through the application of admittedly crude indicators, to evaluate the usefulness of those propositions as explanations of actual behavior” (156).

“My main objective here is to reconstruct the model so that it reflects risk through the introduction of concavity or convexity into the utility functions. In doing so, it is imperative that the model give each actor the opportunity to have a differently shaped utility function, with the extremity of the function’s curvature embodying the extremity of the decision maker’s willingness (or reluctance) to take chances” (156). The second goal of this piece deals with the relative subjectivity of actor’s perceived utility: de Mesquita attempts to build the model to avoid interpersonal comparisons.

This addition to The War Trap was then explored through game theory rationalist models using both the convex and concave curves for either risk averse or risk acceptant actors to determine the relative utility different actors put in potentially conflictual contexts.