If peace fails due to incomplete information and incentives to misrepresent power or resolve, war is supposed to serve as a learning process and allows parties to reach a mutually preferable bargain. We explore crisis bargaining under a third type of uncertainty: the extent to which one side wishes to conquer the other. With incomplete information and take-it-or-leave-it negotiations, this type of uncertainty is isomorphic to incomplete information about the probability of victory. However, with incomplete information and bargaining while fighting, standard convergence results fail: types fail to fully separate because there is no differential cost for delay. Wars correspondingly last longer while benefiting no one. These results help explain empirical differences between territorial versus nonterritorial conflicts and interstate versus intrastate wars.

Studies of bargaining and war generally focus on two sources of incomplete information: uncertainty over the probability of victory and uncertainty over the costs of fighting. We introduce uncertainty over preferences of a spatial policy and argue for its relevance in crisis bargaining. Under these conditions, standard results from the bargaining model of war break down: peace can be Pareto inefficient and it may be impossible to avoid war. We then extend the model to allow for cheap talk pre-play communication. Whereas incentives to misrepresent normally render cheap talk irrelevant, here communication can cause peace and ensure that agreements are efficient. Moreover, peace can become more likely as (1) the variance in the proposer’s belief about its opponent’s type increases and (2) the costs of war decrease. Our results indicate that one major purpose of diplomacy is simply to communicate preferences and that such communications can be credible.

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Authority over related policy issues is often dispersed among multiple government agencies. In this article, I study when Congress should delegate to multiple agencies, and how shared regulatory space complicates agency decision making. To do so, I develop a formal model of decentralized policymaking with two agencies that incorporates information acquisition and information sharing, delineating situations where legislators should and should not prefer multiple agencies. Greater divergence between the agencies' ideal points distorts information sharing and policy choices, but it may increase the amount of information acquisition. Congress achieves better policy outcomes by delegating authority to both agencies if the agencies have strong policy disagreements. If the agencies have similar policy preferences, however, then Congress may want to consolidate authority within one agency because this approach mitigates free‐riding and takes advantage of returns to scale.

In many wars, fighting allows states to hold onto some of the disputed good until the conflict is over. Indeed, war may look attractive to some actors for that purpose even if they will likely lose and incur substantial costs in the process. How does this incentive to stall alter the likelihood of conflict onset? We develop a model in which a delay exists between war’s initiation and termination. During that time, states maintain a division of the disputed good. If states value the future at different rates, no mutually preferable settlement may exist. War is more likely when a more patient state is powerful but holds a smaller share during the dispute. In addition, we show that the parameters for war are non-monotonic in the length of conflict: fighting only occurs when the delay falls in a middle range.