Brothers in arms – An experiment on the alliance puzzle

Alliances in the Shadow of Conflict

“…This second result also reconfirms results in an earlier paper (Ke et al. ) in which victorious alliances were forced into conflict. There, the exogenously imposed internal conflict caused a hold‐up problem when alliance members chose their contributions to alliance effort.…”

“…This type of strategic interaction has attracted considerable attention among theorists and has been used by experimental economists and psychologists . A small subset of this literature also considers experiments on group contests or collective action problems with contest elements (e.g., Bornstein et al ; Parco et al ; Gunnthorsdottir and Rapoport ; Amegashie et al ; Abbink et al ; Kugler et al ; Sheremeta ; Ahn et al ; Cason et al ; Ke et al ) . These contributions do not consider an endogenous choice about internal fighting and the interplay of this decision with the performance of the alliance in a conflict with an outside player or outside group .…”

“…For a comparison of contest efforts in case of exogenously given internal conflict compared to exogenous peaceful sharing, see also Ke et al. ().…”

“…Ke et al. () focused on this aspect in an experiment in which fighting or peaceful sharing was strictly exogenously imposed and found that internal fighting has a negative effect on alliance effort.…”

Strategic and experimental analyses of conflict and terrorism

“…In their study, the authors consider a novel ("stag hunt") alliance technology within the (Tullock-style) contest success function, one that accounts for potential complementarities between allied parties. Previous contributions to alliance formation in conflict (see, e.g., Konrad 2009;Konrad and Kovenock 2009;Ke et al 2013) consider only alliances that contribute conflict inputs that serve as substitutes for one another. In such a conflict alliance, a collective action problem drives down alliance arming and also expected (aggregate) alliance payoff.…”