retail payments new contributions empirical results and unanswered questions abstract we offer a selected survey of retail payments and suggest areas where additional research would prove useful after summarizing eight papers presented at a recent norges bank central bank of norway payment conference and published in this volume we show how they and many of the other papers presented there have contributed to the payments literature we also illustrate how institutional and other differences across countries led to different payment arrangements historically which now due to technological innovation affecting bank costs have made payment arrangements across countries more homogeneous

bias in malmquist index and cost function productivity measurement in banking this paper illustrates how many prior studies ofproductivity growth in the banking industry have been overstated this occurs with both dea malmquist index and parametric stochastic cost frontier productivity measurement approaches the problem is not due to the technique used but in how it is applied it is easiest to see in the banking industry due the nature ofthe data available the bias is eliminated when all outputs and inputs are included in the analysis ensuring that the balance sheet restriction is met although simple in concept this problem and its solution have so far been neglected in the literature r 2002 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

arms races and negotiations two players simultaneously decide whether or not to acquire new weapons in an arms race game each player s type determines his propensity to arm types are private information and are independently drawn from a continuous distribution with probability close to one the best outcome for each player is for neither to acquire new weapons although each prefers to acquire new weapons if he thinks the opponent will there is a small probability that a player is a dominant strategy type who always prefers to acquire new weapons we find conditions under which the unique bayesian nash equilibrium involves an arms race with probability one however if the probability that a player is a dominant strategy type is sufficiently small then there is an equilibrium of the cheap talk extension of the game where the probability of an arms race is close to zero copyright 2004 wiley blackwell

long run prices of primary commodities and oil prices acutely volatile movements in primary commodity prices have drawn considerable interest from empirical researchers exports of these commodities account for the bulk of export earnings of developing countries the traditional demand based framework was unable to explain the marked deterioration in these prices during the 1980s this paper tries to ascertain the role played by real oil prices in explaining the extremely volatile movements in real prices of primary commodities by taking into account oil price shocks over the period 1973 1996 using monthly data real primary commodity prices and real oil prices are cointegrated additionally the error in the cointegrating relation stimulates real commodity price adjustment not real oil price adjustment

conflict and deterrence under strategic risk we examine the determinants of cooperation and the effectiveness of deterrence when fear is a motive for conflict we contrast results obtained in a complete information setting with those obtained in a setting with strategic risk where players have different information about their environment these two strategic settings allow us to identify and distinguish the role of predatory and preemptive incentives as determinants of cooperation and conflict in our model weapons unambiguously facilitate peace under complete information in contrast under strategic risk we show that increases in weapon stocks can have a nonmonotonic effect on the sustainability of cooperation we also show that under strategic risk asymmetry in military strength can facilitate peace and that anticipated peacekeeping interventions may improve incentives for peaceful behavior

partisan conflict and private investment abstract american politics have been characterized by a high degree of partisan conflict in recent years combined with a divided government this has led not only to significant congressional gridlock but also to spells of high fiscal policy uncertainty the unusually slow recovery from the great recession during the same period suggests the possibility that the two phenomena may be related in this paper i investigate the hypothesis that political discord depresses private investment to this end i construct a novel high frequency indicator of partisan conflict the partisan conflict index pci uses a semantic search methodology to measure the frequency of newspaper articles reporting lawmakers disagreement about policy i find a negative relationship between the pci and aggregate investment in the us moreover the decline is persistent which may help explain the slow recovery observed since the 2007 recession ended partisan conflict is also associated with lower capital investment rates at the firm level even when economic policy uncertainty and macroeconomic conditions are controlled for i estimate that about 27 of the decline in corporate investment between 2007 2009 can be attributed to a rise in partisan conflict

capabilities perception and escalation the evolution of crises depends upon interpreting intentions under uncertainty we model crises as a game of two sided incomplete information players are uncertain about their own payoffs from war because of differences between observable and actual capabilities we derive four hypotheses testing them against crises in europe between 1815 and 1970 we show a nonmonotonic relationship between ex ante observable capabilities and the likelihood of violence in a crisis as well as the ex ante likelihood of a negotiated settlement we answer five questions 1 how do differences in observable capabilities between rivals influence the likelihood of a crisis and the escalation to violence 2 how do intangible capabilities alter the effects of observable capabilities on the likelihood of conflict and violence 3 what do national leaders learn from the responses of their adversaries in crises 4 under what conditions can deterrence succeed 5 under what conditions are the strong likely to give in to the weak or vice versa in a crisis

explaining bank market to book ratios evidence from 2006 to 2009 abstract this paper examines the market price to book value ratio for 6604 bank stock observations from december 31 2006 through june 30 2009 we relate each bank s market price to book value ratio to several fundamental ratios and whether the bank took funds from the us treasury under the troubled asset relief program tarp the results of this study show that banks who took tarp funds have lower market price to book value ratios in addition lower relative costs higher non interest income and lower assets in non accrual or foreclosed status are associated with higher market price to book value ratios while controlling for size and other bank attributes

extended deterrence and the outbreak of war successful deterrence it is argued requires a combination of military capabilities and bargaining behavior that enhances a defender s credibility without provoking a potential attacker hypotheses on the political and military conditions under which extended immediate deterrence is likely to succeed or fail are formulated and tested by probit analysis on fifty eight historical cases the empirical results indicate that 1 the military capability of the defender to deny the potential attacker a quick and decisive victory on the battlefield enhances deterrence 2 a policy of reciprocity in diplomacy and military actions by the defender contributes strongly to deterrence success and 3 a past record of backing down under pressure or intransigence in confrontations with the potential attacker increases the likelihood of deterrence failure

assessing bank competition for consumer loans abstract based on frontier analysis we derive inferences of bank consumer loan competition from estimating a revenue cost competition efficiency ce frontier the competitiveness of the 400 billion u s bank consumer loan market is then assessed by comparing results from our frontier ce measure with other competition measures such as hhi lerner index and h statistic these measures are weakly related to one another and only half of them identify banks with the highest loan price as also being the least competitive this is the opposite of what is expected using the frontier ce measure the most and least competitive banks are not located in the most populous states and the largest banks are underrepresented overall the hhi should not be used to indicate competition

trust on the brink of armageddon the first strike game abstract we introduce the experimental first strike game two players accumulate earnings over many rounds in any round a player can deactivate the opponent this means that the opponent loses all earnings and faces severely reduced future payoffs it also means that the opponent can no longer deactivate the aggressor in later rounds thus deactivation is a hostile act but can serve as a self protection device we run four treatments to disentangle the effect of spite fear of spite and trust we find the absence of pure nastiness but nevertheless a strong fear of it mutual trust can considerably reduce hostility

peace war and the balance of power every possible relation between the distribution of power and the likelihood of war has been defended somewhere in the literature on international politics war is least likely if power is distributed equally war is least likely if power is distributed unequally and the distribution of power has no effect on the likelihood of war i try to settle this dispute by examining the effect of expectations about the outcome of war on the choice between war and negotiation i argue that each of these mutually contradictory propositions can be derived from some plausible set of premises and thus that which one is correct depends on which set of premises best describes a situation the most important factors affecting the relation between the distribution of power and the likelihood of war are 1 whether the terms of a compromise agreement that might be accepted in lieu of war affect the distribution of power between the antagonists and therefore the probability that the agreement will be enforced and 2 how many states interests will be affected by the outcome

oil price fluctuations and u s dollar exchange rates adding oil prices to the monetary model of exchange rates we find that oil prices significantly explain movements in the value of the u s dollar usd against major currencies from the 1970s to 2008 our long run and forecasting results are remarkably consistent with an oil exchange rate relationship increases in real oil prices lead to a significant depreciation of the usd against net oil exporter currencies such as canada mexico and russia on the other hand the currencies of oil importers such as japan depreciate relative to the usd when the real oil price goes up

bank competition efficiency in europe a frontier approach abstract there are numerous ways to indicate the degree of banking competition across countries antitrust authorities rely on the structure conduct performance paradigm while academics prefer price mark ups lerner index or correlations of input costs with output prices h statistic these measures are not always strongly correlated within or across countries frontier efficiency analysis is used to devise an alternative indicator of competition and rank european countries by their dispersion from a competition frontier the frontier is determined by how well payment and other costs explain variations in loan deposit rate spread and non interest activity revenues overall differences in competition appear to be small

military coercion in interstate crises in an international crisis states make demands backed by threats to use force although these threats can be explicit in diplomatic communications they will not generally carry much weight unless substantiated by some show of force military measures designed to convey the commitment to resort to arms if one s demands are not satisfactorily met to have an impact this commitment must be credible it must be in one s interest to carry out the threat if the opponent refuses to comply in an environment where states possess private information about their valuations capabilities or costs credibility can be established by actions that a state unwilling to fight would not want or would not dare to take military moves such as arms buildups troop mobilizations and deployments to the potential zone of operations can alter incentives in a crisis by changing one s expected payoff from the use of force these are tacit bargaining moves that can restructure the strategic context thereby creating and possibly signaling one s commitments while undermining those of the opponent how can states use the military instrument to establish commitments and how does the nature of the instrument affect their ability to communicate them credibly to their adversaries there are two distinct mechanisms for credible signaling in economic models information can be transmitted reliably by sinking costs actors burn money to reveal that they value the disputed issue even more in contrast theories of interstate crisis bargaining usually rely on choices that increase the difference between backing down and fighting actors tie their hands by running higher risks of war to reveal their resolve the first mechanism involves costs that actors pay regardless of outcome and the second involves costs that actors pay only if they fail to carry out some threat or promise

guns butter and anarchy a state in the international system implicit in realism must allocate its limited resources between satisfying its intrinsically valued ends and the means of military power i formalize this guns versus butter problem in a simple infinite horizon model in which two states must continually decide how to allocate their resources and whether to attack the other state the analysis establishes sufficient conditions to ensure the existence of an equilibrium in which neither state attacks shows that there is a strictly pareto dominant pair of peaceful equilibrium payoffs characterizes the unique peaceful markov perfect equilibrium that yields them and describes the comparative statics of the equilibrium allocations more broadly the analysis also suggests that the notion of anarchy has little if any substantive significance distinctively related to international politics and that the problem of absolute and relative gains is superfluous

learning information and sorting in market entry games theory and evidence previous data from experiments on market entry games n player games where each player faces a choice between entering a market and staying out appear inconsistent with either mixed or pure nash equilibria here we show that in this class of game learning theory predicts sorting that is in the long run agents play a pure strategy equilibrium with some agents permanently in the market and some permanently out we conduct experiments with a larger number of repetitions than in previous work in order to test this prediction we find that when subjects are given minimal information only after close to 100 periods do subjects begin to approach equilibrium in contrast with full information subjects learn to play a pure strategy equilibrium relatively quickly however the information which permits rapid convergence revelation of the individual play of all opponents

size matters economies of scale in european payments processing abstract this paper investigates the existence and extent of economies of scale in the european payment processing industry it is expected that the creation of a single european payments area sepa will spur consolidations and mergers among european payment processors to more fully realize payment economies of scale we find evidence for the existence of significant economies of scale using data of eight european payment processors during the years 1990 2005 the analysis also reveals that ownership structure is an important factor to explain cost differences across european processing centers

market competition and corporate performance empirical evidence from china listed banks with financial monopoly aspect theorists and policy experts generally believe that the higher degrees of financial monopoly and lower degrees of market competition can result in the higher performance level of companies especial

dynamic spillovers of oil price shocks and economic policy uncertainty this study examines the dynamic relationship between changes in oil prices and the economic policy uncertainty index for a sample of both net oil exporting and net oil importing countries over the period 1997 01 2013 06 to achieve that an extension of the diebold and yilmaz 2009 2012 dynamic spillover index based on structural decomposition is employed the results reveal that economic policy uncertainty oil price shocks responds negatively to aggregate demand oil price shocks economic policy uncertainty shocks furthermore during the great recession of 2007 2009 total spillovers increase considerably reaching unprecedented heights moreover in net terms economic policy uncertainty becomes the dominant transmitter of shocks between 1997 and 2009 while in the post 2009 period there is a significant role for supply side and oil specific demand shocks as net transmitters of spillover effects these results are important for policy makers as well as investors interested in the oil market

game theory and the spiral model when one state engages in a military buildup other states sometimes take this as a sign that it is more aggressive or expansionist than they previously thought some argue that such increases in mutual suspicion can drive arms races and even lead to war psychological bias is often invoked to explain this pattern of growing suspicions leading to hostility this article presents an incomplete information model of an arms race and investigates when escalations should rationally generate increased fears and when in order to reduce such fears security seekers can refrain from building it shows that escalations rationally provoke fear even in the absence of bias and that weak states and states facing high costs of arms racing and war will be especially likely to refrain from building as a way of signaling benign intentions

an analysis of factors affecting price volatility of the us oil market abstract this paper studies the price volatility of the crude oil market by examining the market structure of opec the stable and unstable demand structure and related elasticity of demand in particular the impacts of prosperity and recession of the world economy and the resulting demand shift on crude oil price are investigated the error correction model is used to estimate the demand relations and related elasticity the income effect on demand functions is evaluated to shed light on future prices a simulation of potential oil prices under different scenarios on a cut of one million barrels per day by opec is evaluated from our simulation given the 4 cut in opec production the oil price is expected to increase unless the recession is severe the magnitude and scope of a price hike would be diminished if non opec or domestic production were greatly expanded

rationalist explanations for war realist and other scholars commonly hold that rationally led states can and sometimes do fight when no peaceful bargains exist that both would prefer to war against this view i show that under very broad conditions there will exist negotiated settlements that genuinely rational states would mutually prefer to a risky and costly fight popular rationalist and realist explanations for war fail either to address or to explain adequately what would prevent leaders from locating a less costly bargain essentially just two mechanisms can resolve this puzzle on strictly rationalist terms the first turns on the fact that states have both private information about capabilities and resolve and the incentive to misrepresent it the second turns on the fact that in specific strategic contexts states may be unable credibly to commit to uphold a mutually preferable bargain historical examples suggest that both mechanisms are empirically plausible

all pay contests this paper studies a class of games all pay contests which capture general asymmetries and sunk investments inherent in scenarios such as lobbying competition for market power labor market tournaments and r d races players compete for one of several identical prizes by choosing a score conditional on winning or losing it is weakly better to do so with a lower score this formulation allows for differing production technologies costs of capital prior investments attitudes toward risk and conditional and unconditional investments among others i provide a closed form formula for players equilibrium payoffs and analyze player participation a special case of contests is multiprize complete information all pay auctions

market power in cee banking sectors and the impact of the global financial crisis the aim of this study is to undertake an up to date assessment of market power in central and eastern european banking markets and explore how the global financial crisis has affected market power and what has been the impact of foreign ownership three main results emerge first while there is some convergence in country level market power during the pre crisis period the onset of the global crisis has put an end to this process second bank level market power appears to vary significantly with respect to ownership characteristics third asset quality and capitalization affect differently the margins in the pre crisis and the crisis periods while in the pre crisis period the impacts are similar for all banks regardless of ownership status in the crisis period non performing loans have a negative effect and capitalization a positive effect only for domestically owned banks

make trade not war this paper analyses theoretically and empirically the relationship between military conflicts and trade we show that the conventional wisdom that trade promotes peace is only partially true even in a model where trade is economically beneficial military conflicts reduce trade and leaders are rational when war can occur because of the presence of asymmetric information the probability of escalation is lower for countries that trade more bilaterally because of the opportunity cost associated with the loss of trade gains however countries more open to global trade have a higher probability of war because multilateral trade openness decreases bilateral dependence to any given country and the cost of a bilateral conflict we test our predictions on a large data set of military conflicts on the 1950 2000 period using different strategies to solve the endogeneity issues including instrumental variables we find robust evidence for the contrasting effects of bilateral and multilateral trade openness for proximate countries we find that trade has had a surprisingly large effect on their probability of military conflict

the effect of monetary policy on bank competition using the boone index an interesting strand of the theoretical literature on measuring competition posits that when competition increases in an industry output is reallocated to more efficient firms our first contribution is on the methodology for the empirical implementation of this theoretical test of a change in competition this contribution moves from the relationship between a change in competition and a single all encompassing efficiency to a set of relationships between a change in competition and multiple efficiencies that measure different components of economic performance our second contribution is to apply our empirical methodology to large u s banks the results suggest that competition intensified between these banks during the financial crisis and beyond 2008 15 vis a vis our pre crisis period 1994 07 this points to an increase in competition that has exogenous origins such as the decrease in the loan deposit rate spread which represented the collateral damage to banks from monetary policy to moderate the great recession

equilibrium play in large group market entry games coordination behavior is studied experimentally in a class of noncooperative market entry games featuring symmetric players complete information zero entry costs and several randomly presented values of the market capacity once the market capacity becomes publicly known each player must decide privately whether to enter the market and receive a payoff which increases linearly in the difference between the market capacity and the number of entrants or stay out payoffs for staying out are either positive giving rise to the domain of gains or negative giving rise to the domain of losses the major findings are substantial individual differences that do not diminish with practice aggregate behavior that is organized extremely well in both the domains of gains and losses by the nash equilibrium solution and variations in the population action strategies with repeated play of the stage game that are accounted for by a variant of an adaptive learning model due to roth and erev 1995

overconfidence and excess entry an experimental approach psychological studies show that most people are overconfident about their own relative abilities and unreasonably optimistic about their futures e g shelly e taylor and j d brown 1988 neil d weinstein 1980 when assessing their position in a distribution of peers on almost any positive trait like driving ability ola svenson 1981 income prospects or longevity a vast majority of people say they are above the average although of course only half can be if the trait is symmetrically distributed this paper explores whether optimistic biases could plausibly and predictably influence economic behavior in one particular setting entry into competitive games or markets many empirical studies show that most new businesses fail within a few years for example using plant level data from the u s census of manufacturers spanning 1963 1982 timothy dunne et al 1988 estimated that 61 5 percent of all entrants exited within five years and 79 6 percent exited within 10 years most of these exits are failures see also dunne et al 1989a 1989b d shapiro and r s khemani 1987

arms races and arms control modeling the hawk perspective of the three major theories developed by post world war 11 american social science to explain arms races the repeated prisoner s dilemma the spiral model and the deterrence model the deterrence model has received the least attention from game theorists i present a model of this perspective and discuss its implications for arms racing and armscontrol theory arms races arise in the model when there is a conflict of interest between two states and uncertainty about the ability of at least one side to bear the strains of increased military spending the model provides support for two common critiques of arms control first arms control is difficult to achieve when it is most needed when there is a dispute accompanied by uncertainty that could lead to war second arms races though they occur in times of tension do not necessarily increase the likelihood of war and may even reduce it by reducing uncertainty about relative power

conflict war and redistribution this article analyzes the circumstances under which conflict leads to the outbreak of war using a formal model which incorporates both the redistribution of resources as an alternative to war and imperfect information countries act as rational agents concerned with both consumption and the public bad of a war in the first period both countries can either consume or build arms whereas in the second period there can be either the threat or the use of force to reallocate resources if both countries are fully informed then there will be no war but rather a voluntary redistribution of resources in a situation of asymmetric information however in which one country is fully informed and the other is not a war can occur if the uninformed country uses a separating equilibrium strategy precommitting itself to a positive probability of war in order to prevent bluffing by the informed country

malmquist type indices in the presence of negative data an application to bank branches in this paper we develop an index and an indicator of productivity change that can be used with negative data for that purpose the range directional model rdm a particular case of the directional distance function is used for computing efficiency in the presence of negative data we use rdm efficiency measures to arrive at a malmquist type index which can reflect productivity change and we use rdm inefficiency measures to arrive at a luenberger productivity indicator and relate the two the productivity index and indicator are developed relative to a fixed meta technology and so they are referred to as a meta malmquist index and meta luenberger indicator we also address the fact that vrs technologies are used for computing the productivity index and indicator a requirement under negative data which raises issues relating to the interpretability of the index we illustrate how the meta malmquist index can be used not only for comparing the performance of a unit in two time periods but also for comparing the performance of two different units at the same or different time periods the proposed approach is then applied to a sample of bank branches where negative data were involved the paper shows how the approach yields information from a variety of perspectives on performance which management can use

bank concentration and retail interest rates abstract the recent wave of mergers in the euro area raises the question whether the increase in concentration has offset the increase in competition in european banking through deregulation we test this question by estimating a simple cournot model of bank pricing we construct country and product specific measures of bank concentration and find that for loans and demand deposits increasing concentration may have resulted in less competitive pricing by banks whereas for savings and time deposits the model is rejected suggesting increases in contestability and or efficiency in these markets finally the paper discusses some implications for tests of the effect of concentration on monetary policy transmission

a frontier measure of u s banking competition the three main measures of competition hhi lerner index and h statistic are uncorrelated for u s banks we investigate why this occurs propose a frontier measure of competition and apply it to five major bank service lines fee based banking services comprise 35 percent of bank revenues so assessing competition by service line is preferred to using a single measure for traditional activities extended to the entire bank as the lerner index and the h statistic together explain only 1 percent of hhi variation and the hhi is similarly unrelated to the frontier method developed here current merger acquisition guidelines should be adjusted as banking concentration seems unrelated to likely more accurate competition measures

time varied causality between us partisan conflict shock and crude oil return abstract to investigate the causality between us partisan conflict shock and crude oil return this paper utilizes bootstrap full sample granger causality and bootstrap rolling window sub sample granger causality tests although no evidence supports the causal nexus between partisan conflict shock and crude oil return with full sample data time varied causality is observed for particular sub samples such difference can be attributed to the parameter non constancy in the var system in terms of the empirical results the us partisan conflict shock causes the fluctuations of the crude oil market in 2008 2009 and 2014 2015 however such influence is temporary inversely the crude oil return causes us partisan shock in 1985 1986 1991 1994 1998 2000 and 2012 2013 these findings indicate crude oil market significantly affects political stability of the us especially during the periods of the gulf war and opec production cut the empirical results are robust in terms of both sample setting variation and window size selection

checkmate exploring backward induction among chess players it is difficult to overstate the profound impact that game theory has had on the economic approach and on the sciences more generally for that reason understanding how closely the assumptions that underpin game theoretic analysis conform to actual human decision making is a question of first order importance to economists in this spirit backward induction represents one of the most basic concepts in game theory backward induction played a prominent role in reinhard selten s 1965 development of perfect equilibrium and it has helped to shape the modern refinement literature although backward induction is a cornerstone of game theory existing empirical evidence suggests that economic agents engage in backward induction less frequently than theorists might hope backward induction has fared especially poorly in the centipede game which was introduced by robert w rosenthal 1981 and has since been extensively analyzed ken binmore 1987 robert j aumann 1988 philip j reny 1988 david m kreps 1990 geir b asheim and martin dufwenberg 2003 the original centipede game is a two player finite move game in which the subjects alternate choosing whether to end the game or to pass to the other player the subject s payoff to ending the game at a particular node is greater than the payoff he receives if the other player ends the game at the next node but less than the payoff earned if the other player elects not to end the game the player making the final choice gets paid more from stopping than from passing and thus would be expected to stop if the opponent will stop at the last node then conditional on reaching the penultimate node the player maximizes his earnings by stopping at that node following this logic further backward induction leads to the unique subgame perfect equilibrium the game is stopped at the first node as pointed out in prior research

the joint estimation of bank level market power and efficiency the aim of this study is to provide a methodology for the joint estimation of efficiency and market power of individual banks the proposed method utilizes the separate implications of the new empirical industrial organization and the stochastic frontier literatures and suggests identification using the local maximum likelihood lml technique through lml estimation of market power of individual banks becomes feasible while a number of restrictive theoretical and empirical assumptions are relaxed the empirical analysis is carried out on the basis of emu bank data market power estimates indicate fairly competitive conduct in general however heterogeneity in market power estimates is substantial across banks the latter result suggests that the practice of some banks deviates from the average fairly competitive behavior a finding that has important policy implications finally efficiency and market power present a negative relationship which is in line with the so called quiet life hypothesis

efficiency technical change and returns to scale in large us banks panel data evidence from an output distance function satisfying theoretical regularity abstract this paper provides parametric estimates of technical change efficiency change economies of scale and total factor productivity growth for large banks those with assets in excess of 1 billion in the united states over the period from 2000 to 2005 this is done by estimating an output distance function subject to theoretical regularity within a bayesian framework we find that failure to incorporate theoretical regularity conditions results in mismeasured shadow revenue and or cost shares which in turn leads to perverse conclusions regarding productivity growth our results from the regularity constrained model show that total factor productivity of the large us banks grew at an average rate of 1 98 over the sample period however our estimates also show a clear downward trend in the growth rate of total factor productivity and our decomposition of the primal divisia total factor productivity growth index into its three components technical change efficiency change and economies of scale indicates that technical change is the driving force behind this decline

arms races and conflict experimental evidence we study escalation and aggression in an experimental first strike game in which two participants play multiple rounds of a money earning task in each round both players can spend money to accumulate weapons the player with more weapons can spend money to strike against the other player which almost totally eliminates the victim s earnings potential and removes their capacity to strike weapons can serve as a means of deterrence in four treatments we find that deterrence is strengthened if weapon stocking cannot be observed that a balance of power is effective in maintaining peace and that mutually beneficial trade decreases the risk of confrontation but not necessarily the likelihood of costly arms races