Cycles of Conflict: An Economic Model
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Acemoglu_Cycles of.pdf
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Author(s)
Acemoglu, Daron
Wolitzky, Alexander Greenberg
Date Issued
April 2014
Journal
American Economic Review
Publisher
American Economic Association
Citation
Acemoglu, Daron, and Alexander Wolitzky. “ Cycles of Conflict: An Economic Model.” American Economic Review 104, no. 4 (April 2014): 1350–1367.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We propose a model of cycles of conflict and distrust. Overlapping generations of agents from two groups sequentially play coordination games under incomplete information about whether the other side consists of bad types who always take bad actions. Good actions may be misperceived as bad and information about past actions is limited. Conflict spirals start as a result of misperceptions but also contain the seeds of their own dissolution: Bayesian agents eventually conclude that the spiral likely started by mistake, and is thus uninformative of the opposing group's type. The agents then experiment with a good action, restarting the cycle.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.104.4.1350
