Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Third parties often intervene in conflicts and use coercive tactics to try to prevent or stop disputants from fighting. The conventional wisdom holds that coercive intervention is generally effective because it alters the balance of power between disputants or drives up their costs for failing to reach a negotiated settlement. Unfortunately, the logic underpinning the conventional wisdom does not adequately account for the effects of strategic interaction. For example, although intervention might make one party more willing to settle a dispute, the other party may exploit the situation and take riskier actions or make larger demands. Thus, intervention may produce unintended consequences that undermine conflict management efforts. Some analysts have argued that the incentive structure produced by a third party may create a moral hazard. This essay shows that although the concept of moral hazard is heuristically useful, it does not accurately describe the incentive structure produced by third-party intervention. Moral Hazards only occur when there is an opportunity for agents to take "hidden actions." As it turns out, when third parties engage in coercive intervention, they are seldom unaware that their actions are emboldening some of the disputants. Instead, there are a number of reasons why third parties may choose to ignore these adverse effects. Most importantly, although intervention may unleash some countervailing forces, it may nevertheless decrease the overall chance of conflict.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Concerns about vulnerability heighten as disasters result in increasing societal damage globally. Based on the case of wildfire hazards in Arizona forests, this paper addresses two questions: (1) what influences disaster vulnerability? (2) how can people reduce risks? Like other locales in region, the study area has urbanized as large wildfires have occurred with increasing frequency; these changes have amplified hazards. Management interventions in fire-prone communities assume that unsafe conditions result from inadequate residential knowledge of hazards, yet I find no linkage between hazard perception and exposure. My results reveal that residents accurately perceive risk, and that population growth, amenity values and institutional incentives expose households to practically irremediable hazards. Hazard vulnerability is primarily produced through decision-making within institutions and secondarily by households. These findings address risk management policy in two respects. Programs intended to educate residents about hazards provide a necessary, but not sufficient, basis for reducing hazard vulnerability. The focus on residents must be expanded to include institutional decision-making processes that guide hazardous forms of development.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: As contracts, international agreements are susceptible to a moral hazard problem: a state may have an incentive to take private actions that adversely affect the realization of the treaty's objective. In the recent literature of rational treaty design, treaty provisions have been proven to systematically overcome particular cooperation problems (e.g., Rosendorff and Milner 2001, Koremenos 2005 on uncertainty). This paper formally demonstrates that there exists a treaty mechanism- an in-kind or issue-linkage transfer-- that will induce states that would otherwise not fully comply to do so without any enforcement or monitoring provisions when their cooperation problem is not one of uncertainty (i.e., enforcement, redistribution, commitment). This equilibrium outcome results from the redistribution of risk and incentives central to treaty-making. The paper sets necessary conditions and outlines equilibrium-outcome restrictions. One important restriction is the size of the agreement (i.e., number of members), however the model is extended to show that this problem can be overcome under certain circumstances given the asymmetry of costs of compliance amongst member-states.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines the potential risk effects of alliance commitments on dispute onset and escalation. This issue is theoretically framed as a moral hazard problem from the economic literature: if one party (agent) pledges a particular commitment to another party (principal), the moral hazard for the agent arises if the principal’s behavior (e.g. a reckless move) raises the risk for an agent to act on its behalf due to its contractual commitment to the principal. In international relations, alliance commitments might pose such a moral hazard risk in the context of extended deterrence. That is, how much can the protege’s behavior vis-a-vis another state actually entrap its ally (“defender”) into a conflict? I separate an answer to this question into two specific issues: (1) whether states with alliance commitments from others are more likely to initiate conflicts than other states without such alliance provisions; (2) given that a conflict is initiated between the protege and its opponent, whether the protege is likely to get an aid from its ally and at what escalation level. After the conceptual and theoretical discussion, the paper proceeds with a quantitative empirical analysis and draws conclusions for current U.S. policies in cases of its relations with Taiwan in East Asia, India and Pakistan in South Asia, and Israel in the Middle East.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Increasingly powerful economics-side voices have set the agenda for managing and regulating hazards. Economic equations and the famous Hand Formula suggest that precaution is adequate where the marginal cost = the marginal benefit from precaution. I critique this method of risk assessment on two grounds: 1) it can never include sufficient information and 2) it accepts that there will be accidents. My starting point is the High Hazard/Low-Probability (HHLP) event managing organization. I suggest that there are certain types of organizations for which any nonzero chance of failure is too high and that a different type of management is required to ensure public safety. Many organizations have begun to use the term "Stewardship" to describe their relationship to hazard. This paper parses out the meaning of stewardship-based management in legal, religious, moral and environmental senses and applies that to managing catastrophic, but low-probability hazards. It suggests that stewardship is an alternative approach to managing certain types of, but not necessarily all, hazards.