Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization Give Peace a Chance: the Effect of Ownership and Asymmetric Information on Peace

In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier's archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: a b s t r a c t We study the possibility of peace when two countries fight a war over the ownership of a resource. War is always the outcome of the game played by rational countries – under complete or asymmetric information – when there is no pre-established distribution of the resource among countries. When there is such a distribution of the resource, under complete information peace is feasible for some initial distributions of the resource, whereas under asymmetric information there are two classes of equilibria: Peaceful Equilibria, in which peace has a positive probability, and Aggressive Equilibria, which assign probability one to war. Surprisingly, a little asymmetric information may yield war.