How close does a nation come to the brink of war with an opponent during the process of crisis bargaining?The present study constructs a new formal model focused on a challenger's incentive to intensify military provocations against a defender that involves a trade-off between securing a more...

Previous research on international crisis theory paid much attention to correlations between audience costs and a state's advantage over its opponents in wars. The advantage of generating audience costs is that it makes credible a state's costly signal of its resolve via military threats....