The Inefficient use of power : costly conflict with complete information
By: POWELL, Robert
.
Material type: 
ArticlePublisher: New York : Cambridge University Press, May 2004American Political Science Review 98, 2, p. 231-242Abstract: Recent work across a wide range of issues in political economy as well as in American, comparative, and international politics tries to explain the inefficient use of power - revolutions, civil wars, high levels of public debt, international conflictm and costly policy insulation - in terms of commitment problems. This paper shows that a common mechanism is at work in a number of these diverse studies. This common mechanism provides a more general formulation of a type of commitment problem that can arise in many different substantive settings. The present analysis the formalizes this mechanism as an "inefficiency condition" that ensures that all of the equilibria of a stochastic game are inefficient. This condition has a natural substative interpretation: Large, rapid changes in the actor´s relative powe (measured in terms of their minmax payoffs) may cause inefficiency
Recent work across a wide range of issues in political economy as well as in American, comparative, and international politics tries to explain the inefficient use of power - revolutions, civil wars, high levels of public debt, international conflictm and costly policy insulation - in terms of commitment problems. This paper shows that a common mechanism is at work in a number of these diverse studies. This common mechanism provides a more general formulation of a type of commitment problem that can arise in many different substantive settings. The present analysis the formalizes this mechanism as an "inefficiency condition" that ensures that all of the equilibria of a stochastic game are inefficient. This condition has a natural substative interpretation: Large, rapid changes in the actor´s relative powe (measured in terms of their minmax payoffs) may cause inefficiency
Click on an image to view it in the image viewer
There are no comments for this item.