16:50 - 18:30
PS10
Room:
Room: Meeting Room 2.1
Panel Session 10
Peter Schram - Nuclear Brinkmanship Through Conventional Conflict
Bradley Smith - Arms Transfers and the Dynamics of Intervention
Livio Di Lonardo - Deterrence and Preventive Sanctions
Livio Di Lonardo - Denial and Punishment in Deterrence
Denial and Punishment in Deterrence
PS10-4
Presented by: Livio Di Lonardo
Livio Di Lonardo 1, Kerim Can Kavakli 1, Scott Tyson 2
1 Bocconi University
2 University of Rochester
Leaders can use a variety of tools to deter an enemy from taking undesirable actions. They can try to limit the enemy's ability to benefit from future attacks ("deterrence by denial"), or punish the enemy ex post ("deterrence by punishment"). These two canonical approaches to deterrence present different challenges and are an alyzed often separately. In this paper we build a game theoretic model that brings together the two approaches and highlights an unintended consequence of investing in denial capabilities. Previous work has argued that deterrence by denial suffers from low perceived capability (to stop attacks) while punishment strategies suffer from low perceived willingness (to retaliate). Our main contribution is to show that efforts to correct the former problem may end up exacerbating the latter. Specifically, investing in denial capabilities may actually signal to enemies a lack of resolve to punish transgressions. The reason is, for unresolved leaders, the only hope of deterring future attacks is to bolster their denial capabilities enough to reduce the benefit of an attack. We show that when investment in denial produces uncertain returns, this may lower one's credibility and prove to be a self-defeating strategy. Our results improve our ability to explain the behavior of deterring countries and to account for the empirical regularities on det errence failures.