SARA MCLAUGHLIN MITCHELL: The bargaining model of waris a theory that basically says that war between governmentsis irrational, given the cost of war.So the question it asks is, why would countries fight warsgiven that they're going to pay economic and human costsfor war?And it comes up with three explanations

SARA MCLAUGHLIN MITCHELL [continued]: to understand the puzzle of war.So the first one is the idea of information asymmetry.So that you might get war because oneside overestimates its capabilitiesrelative to the other side that it's facing.It doesn't know exactly what kind of military capabilities

SARA MCLAUGHLIN MITCHELL [continued]: the other side has.You could also get war because of whatare called commitment problems, where you might havean incentive to engage in a preventive wartoday because the other side is growing economicallyor militarily.So you could think about if China'srising, for example, today, would the United Stateshave incentive to preventively launch a war now

SARA MCLAUGHLIN MITCHELL [continued]: if we worried about China's commitmentto peace in the future?Now, we could also think about the third cause of war,and the bargaining model is what theycall issue indivisibilities, so that some issues aremore difficult to divide than others.And you could think about something like Jerusalemwhere the city has importance to many religious groups

SARA MCLAUGHLIN MITCHELL [continued]: and actors, and so there's reallyno division of the territory that would be considered fairby all of the actors involved.So the bargaining model has developed different typesof explanations for war by focusing on these informationasymmetries, the commitment problems, and issueindivisibilities.