Peace through bribing

Abstract

We study a model in which before a conflict between two parties escalates into a war (in the form of an all-pay auction), a party can offer a take-it-or-leave-it bribe to the other one for a peaceful settlement. We distinguish between various degrees of peace prospects-implementability, weak security and strong security. We first characterize the necessary and sufficient conditions for peace implementability and weak security. We then show that weak security implies strong security. We also consider a requesting-a-bribe game and characterize the necessary and sufficient conditions for existence of a robust peaceful equilibrium. We find that all such robust peaceful equilibria share the same request.