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Military mobilization simultaneously sinks costs, because it must be paid for regardless of the outcome, and ties hands, because it increases the probability of winning should war occur. Existing studies neglect this dualism and cannot explain signaling behavior and tacit bargaining well. I present a formal model that incorporates both functions and shows that many existing conclusions about crisis escalation have to be qualified. Contrary to models with either pure sunk costs or tying-hands signaling, bluffing is possible in equilibrium. General monotonicity results that relate the probability of war to an informed player's expected payoff from fighting do not extend to this environment with its endogenous distribution of power. Peace may involve higher military allocations than war. Rational deterrence models also assume that a commitment either does or does not exist. Extending these, I show how the military instrument can create commitments and investigate the difficulties with communicating them.

Domestic audience costs can help leaders establish credible commitments by tying their hands. Most studies assume these costs without explaining how they arise. I link domestic audience costs to the citizens' ability to sanction the leadership for pursuing a policy they would not want if they had the same information about its quality. How can citizens learn about policy quality? I model two information transmission mechanisms: one potentially contaminated by politically motivated strategic behavior (leader and opposition), and another that is noisy and possibly biased (media). In equilibrium, audience costs can arise from strategic sources only in mixed regimes under relatively restrictive conditions, and cannot arise in autocracies or democracies. However, in democratic polities the media can play a mitigating role and does enable leaders to generate audience costs. Still, their ability to do so depends on the institutional protections guaranteeing freedom of the media from political manipulation. Domestic audience costs are not necessarily linear in regime type, as often assumed in applied research.Tying hands can be an effective way to communicate the credibility of one's commitment (Schelling 1966). Domestic audience costs are one mechanism for doing so that has become fairly popular in recent studies of international behavior (Fearon 1994a). Briefly, if leaders take actions that increase the costs of backing down from their position, then they can effectively commit to holding out for concessions. However, as Smith (1998) and Schultz (1999) note, this mechanism lacks microfoundations: the theoretical models that investigate the impact of audience costs on behavior have largely taken them for granted. This article clarifies what an interpretation of domestic audience costs would look like, and investigates the theoretical possibility for generating such costs endogenously. Under what conditions would a rational audience impose such costs on a leader? How do these conditions depend on the institutional structure of the polity?The results suggest that although it is possible for these costs to arise, their generation is far from straightforward. In particular, if one relies solely on strategic sources of information (government, opposition parties), citizens of either democracies or autocracies are unlikely to learn enough to credibly threaten to sanction

W hy do wars last as long as they do? What can an initiator expect when it starts a war? Theories of endogenous war termination show that duration and outcome are closely related to the willingness to make concessions on war aims, and that this willingness is itself determined by warfare. Leaders can, and often do, modify their demands as they update their beliefs about the strength of the adversary, its resolve, and the costs of compelling it to make concessions. They revise war aims as the expectations about the military outcome rise and fall with battlefield developments (Goemans 2000). However, in the standard empirical specification of the problem, it is assumed that war aims are exogenous to fighting (Bennett and Stam 1996;Werner 1998).The goal of this article is to derive several hypotheses from the theories of endogenous war termination, test them with statistical techniques that account for the relationship between duration and outcome, and assess the usefulness of the theories by comparing the findings with known results. Substantively, we want to know if it is possible to form coherent predictions about the duration and outcome of wars. Because expectations about termination of war influence the desire to initiate it, explaining these Branislav L. Slantchev is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0521 (slantchev@ucsd.edu). expectations would also help explain causes of wars, possibly leading to theories of prevention.We now have theoretical studies that enable us to hypothesize about factors that determine, at least in part, how wars are fought and how they end. However, because extant empirical studies have not taken into account these theories, the analyses have methodological shortcomings that I address. Deriving hypotheses directly from formal theories of endogenous war termination has two advantages. First, we have more confidence in the observed correlations because the causal mechanism is logically sound and internally consistent. Second, we can judge the promise of these theories empirically before committing to (expensive) data collection efforts that would be necessary to probe the insights deeper. The main substantive new findings are:r Long wars are expected to end badly for the initiator.This finding is quite robust even when tested against alternative econometric specifications and provides support for the principle of convergence that has emerged from the theoretical studies. r Information acquired while fighting outweighs information available prior to the war. This lends further