This paper shows why states, acting in their own self-interest, may create informational asymmetries that lead to war. In our models, two actors with no private information invest in military capacity before engaging in crisis bargaining. If bargaining fails, the states go to war, and the...

I consider the design of policy-making institutions to aggregate preferences and information. A pervasive incentive problem hinders the creation of desirable deliberative institutions; participants that expect to have minority interests have an incentive to misrepresent their information....