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....

In this paper we study a two period contest where the strength of players in the second period depends on the result of the contest in the first stage. We show that in contrast to one-shot contests in the same setting, heterogeneous players exert different efforts in the first stage and rent...