In this paper, we summarize a series of experimental studies that show that democracies don't fight each other because their leaders have very few political incentives to do so. The use of force against other democracies is perceived by the public and by leaders of democratic states as a failure...

Previous studies of political decision making have used only ''static'' choice sets, where alternatives are ''fixed'' and are a priori known to the decision maker. We assess the affect of a dynamic choice set (new alternatives appear during the decision process) on strategy selection and choice...

This research addresses the question of why some crises between states are resolvedthrough negotiated agreements while others result in continued conflict or escalate to war.The model deviates from previous approaches to the study of conflict management in fourkey ways: 1) management is treated...

The cognitive calculus theory of foreign policy decision making is an attempt to bridge the gap between two research orientations in the international relations literature: outcome validity and process validity. The cognitive calculus theory models the mental calculations of foreign policy...

Prospect theory is a descriptive model of individual decision-making under risk (Kahneman and Tversky 1979). The central tenet of prospect theory posits that the risk orientation of decision-makers is affected by the gains vs. losses domains in which they are situated. Individuals are predicted...