You might want to fight even if it’s more expensive than compromising, because you are playing a repeated game. You don’t want to send a signal that you are a kind of person who compromises with an aggressor.
In repeated versions of the hawk-dove game, it’s difficult to get war in an equilibrium unless there are some players who have very high discount rates for the future. There’s always the implicit off-equilibrium threat of resisting if someone deviates and tries to go to war, but such an off-equilibrium threat doesn’t need to be observed in order to be effective.
Maybe the best example of this is monetary policy: the US doesn’t have a hyperinflation because people understand the Federal Reserve’s commitment to contract monetary policy enormously if that happened. However, in fact we never observe the Federal Reserve’s commitment to fight hyperinflation be tested by the US dollar becoming worthless overnight.
You can say that in the real world these commitments will always be tested, but the reason they are tested is usually because of disagreement about how credible the commitments are, not because there are some madmen going around who wage war for fun.
What I’ve outlined in the post is not the only way in which war can happen, since the world is complicated and a big phenomenon like war is going to defy any simple explanation. I think it’s better to read the post as saying “ambiguity causes conflict”, as is stated in the title, rather than “all conflict is caused by ambiguity”, which would be false.
I think with Putin the question is more about what his objective is rather than what his discount rate is. It seems to me that Putin is motivated by his desire to see the Russian Empire restored in some form or another, and he cares less about indicators such as Russia’s productivity, economic potential, soft power, et cetera.
He has repeatedly said that he sees the fall of the Russian Empire (in the form of the dissolution of the USSR) as a disaster for Russia. In this, there are definite parallels between Putin and Hitler: both of them were driven by nationalism and a desire to see what they saw as people belonging to their nation and their national territory returned to their country. For Hitler, these were the German-speaking populations in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire and the territories that Germany had lost in the Treaty of Versailles. For Putin, they are the territories that Russia lost when the USSR collapsed.
That’s why Ukraine is more important to him than it might’ve been to us if we were in his position, and why he’s willing to bear such large costs in order to ensure Ukraine doesn’t drift away from the Russian sphere of influence and enter NATO, which Putin sees as a military alliance hostile to Russia.
Edit: If you think I’m wrong, you can write a reply to the comment along with (or instead of) downvoting it. I’d like to know exactly where I’m wrong so that I can correct my model of the situation.
I think your observations on motivation/goals are correct—though also admit I’m not qualified to be sure about those claims. They are, it seems, rather widely shared/suggested.
But I don’t think that has really changed for, what?, maybe 20 years now. So is the fact we see Putin escalating things now to what most in the world seem to think are insane levels maybe says his discount rate (or his time horizon, had not considered that before) has changed I would think. That’s following on your statement in point 1.
If the game theory is saying we get war with high discount rates—or that the probabilities of such outcomes greatly increase - then what might we think Putin’s rate changed to? Why? And, perhaps, what other implication would that change suggest?
I had not thought about it before starting this comment but wondering what the ramifications might be in the game when one player suddenly is given a much shorter time frame in the game. Does that perhaps produce the same outcomes as the high discount rate parameter in the game model?
It’s more than that, there is no uncertainty about probabilities in the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(game) and yet, there can be a conflict.
You might want to fight even if it’s more expensive than compromising, because you are playing a repeated game. You don’t want to send a signal that you are a kind of person who compromises with an aggressor.
Two points about this:
In repeated versions of the hawk-dove game, it’s difficult to get war in an equilibrium unless there are some players who have very high discount rates for the future. There’s always the implicit off-equilibrium threat of resisting if someone deviates and tries to go to war, but such an off-equilibrium threat doesn’t need to be observed in order to be effective.
Maybe the best example of this is monetary policy: the US doesn’t have a hyperinflation because people understand the Federal Reserve’s commitment to contract monetary policy enormously if that happened. However, in fact we never observe the Federal Reserve’s commitment to fight hyperinflation be tested by the US dollar becoming worthless overnight.
You can say that in the real world these commitments will always be tested, but the reason they are tested is usually because of disagreement about how credible the commitments are, not because there are some madmen going around who wage war for fun.
What I’ve outlined in the post is not the only way in which war can happen, since the world is complicated and a big phenomenon like war is going to defy any simple explanation. I think it’s better to read the post as saying “ambiguity causes conflict”, as is stated in the title, rather than “all conflict is caused by ambiguity”, which would be false.
Perhaps an interesting question here might be just what one can assess Putin’s discount rate as.
I think with Putin the question is more about what his objective is rather than what his discount rate is. It seems to me that Putin is motivated by his desire to see the Russian Empire restored in some form or another, and he cares less about indicators such as Russia’s productivity, economic potential, soft power, et cetera.
He has repeatedly said that he sees the fall of the Russian Empire (in the form of the dissolution of the USSR) as a disaster for Russia. In this, there are definite parallels between Putin and Hitler: both of them were driven by nationalism and a desire to see what they saw as people belonging to their nation and their national territory returned to their country. For Hitler, these were the German-speaking populations in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire and the territories that Germany had lost in the Treaty of Versailles. For Putin, they are the territories that Russia lost when the USSR collapsed.
That’s why Ukraine is more important to him than it might’ve been to us if we were in his position, and why he’s willing to bear such large costs in order to ensure Ukraine doesn’t drift away from the Russian sphere of influence and enter NATO, which Putin sees as a military alliance hostile to Russia.
Edit: If you think I’m wrong, you can write a reply to the comment along with (or instead of) downvoting it. I’d like to know exactly where I’m wrong so that I can correct my model of the situation.
I think your observations on motivation/goals are correct—though also admit I’m not qualified to be sure about those claims. They are, it seems, rather widely shared/suggested.
But I don’t think that has really changed for, what?, maybe 20 years now. So is the fact we see Putin escalating things now to what most in the world seem to think are insane levels maybe says his discount rate (or his time horizon, had not considered that before) has changed I would think. That’s following on your statement in point 1.
If the game theory is saying we get war with high discount rates—or that the probabilities of such outcomes greatly increase - then what might we think Putin’s rate changed to? Why? And, perhaps, what other implication would that change suggest?
I had not thought about it before starting this comment but wondering what the ramifications might be in the game when one player suddenly is given a much shorter time frame in the game. Does that perhaps produce the same outcomes as the high discount rate parameter in the game model?