Abstract: In many contexts, patrons wish to simultaneously increase a protégé’s military power while reducing the probability of war between that protégé and its enemy. Are these goals compatible? I show that the answer is yes when states face uncertainty over military allotments. Arms transfers mitigate the information problem by making both strong and weak types behave more similarly. This encourages uninformed states to make safer demands, which decreases the probability of war. As a result, transfers to the informed actor both increase bargaining power and enhance efficiency under these conditions.
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- Arms Negotiations, War Exhaustion, and the Credibility of Preventive War
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- Bargaining over the Bomb: The Successes and Failures of Nuclear Negotiations
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- Getting a Hand By Cutting Them Off: How Uncertainty over Political Corruption Affects Violence
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- How Fast and How Expensive? Uncertainty and Incentives in Nuclear Negotiations
- How Uncertainty About Judicial Nominees Can Distort the Confirmation Process
- Introducing 𝜈-CLEAR: A Latent Variable Approach to Measuring Nuclear Proficiency
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- Only Here to Help? Bargaining and the Perverse Incentives of International Institutions
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