What the authors characterize as violence is really an input provided by the parties to encroach or resist encroachment and bears no necessary relationship to actual violent conflict, which is an outcome. By failing to account for this, the authors neglect the selection effect so familiar to law and economics scholars in explaining which legal disputes are selected for litigation. It simply shifts the parties' expectations and changes the character of the disputes that get litigated. But uncertainty, alone, may not be enough if the parties hold identical expectations. Rather, asymmetric information about probabilities, valuations, or costs seems necessary to generate violence conflict.
Violence occurs when the parties hold mistaken beliefs about one another's type.
From this perspective, violence is a costly but effective method of correcting mistaken signals. Conditional on land reform policy, violence might even be seen as a socially efficient signaling mechanism compared to the alternative. For all its drawbacks, a process of targeted invasions backed by the threat of violent conflict may be superior. This hypothesis has testable implications, the most obvious of which is that the parties will have a mutual interest in minimizing information asymmetry and the associated social losses from violence. By categorizing land disputes according to various characteristics, we should be able to predict that information asymmetry will decline as a given category of disputes recurs and the parties learn.