The Robustness of 'Enemy-of-My-Enemy-is-My-Friend' Alliances

This paper examines the robustness of alliance formation in a three-player, two-stage game in which each of two players compete against a third player in disjoint sets of contests. Although the players with the common opponent share no common interests, we find that under the lottery contest success...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEc
Main Authors Rietzke, David, Roberson, Brian
Format Paper
LanguageEnglish
Published St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis 01.01.2010
Subjects
Alliances
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Summary:This paper examines the robustness of alliance formation in a three-player, two-stage game in which each of two players compete against a third player in disjoint sets of contests. Although the players with the common opponent share no common interests, we find that under the lottery contest success function (CSF) there exists a range of parameter configurations in which the players with the common opponent have incentive to form an alliance involving a pre-conflict transfer of resources. Models that utilize the lottery CSF typically yield qualitatively different results from those arising in models with the auction CSF (Fang 2002). However, under the lottery and the auction CSFs, the parameter configurations within which players with a common opponent form an alliance are closely related. Our results, thus, provide a partial robustness result for 'enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend' alliances.