Tying Hands, Sinking Costs, and Leader Attributes

2018/10/21 by Keren Yarhi-Milo, Joshua D. Kertzer, Jonathan Renshon · 173 citations
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Criticism #Economics #Elite #International Relations and Foreign Policy #Law #Microeconomics #Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts #Peacebuilding and International Security #Political science #Politics #Popularity #Psychology #Public relations #Social psychology #Tying

paper · doi:10.1177/0022002718785693

published in Journal of Conflict Resolution 62(10), 2150-2179 (SAGE Publishing)

openalex publication_date 2018/10/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25

Abstract

Do costly signals work? Despite their widespread popularity, both hands-tying and sunk-cost signaling have come under criticism, and there’s little direct evidence that leaders understand costly signals the way our models tell us they should. We present evidence from a survey experiment fielded on a unique sample of elite decision makers from the Israeli Knesset. We find that both types of costly signaling are effective in shaping assessments of resolve for both leaders and the public. However, although theories of signaling tend to assume homogenous audiences, we show that leaders vary significantly in how credible they perceive signals to be, depending on their foreign policy dispositions, rather than their levels of military or political experience. Our results thus encourage international relations scholars to more fully bring heterogeneous recipients into our theories of signaling and point to the important role of dispositional orientations for the study of leaders.

Citations

• When Backing Down Is the Right Decision: Partisanship, New Information, and Audience Costs
• The Cost of Empty Threats: A Penny, Not a Pound
• Rationalist explanations for war
• Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes
• Autocratic Audience Costs: Regime Type and Signaling Resolve
• Domestic Audience Costs in International Relations: An Experimental Approach
• Signaling Foreign Policy Interests
• Promises or Policies? An Experimental Analysis of International Agreements and Audience Reactions
• The Illusion of Democratic Credibility

Cited by

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• Winning Hearts and Minds? How the United States Reassured During the Russo-Ukrainian War
• Reassuring allies in times of crisis: assessing the effectiveness of tools for alliance reassurance in crises
• The impact of situational context and dispositions on costly signals of reassurance: Experimental evidence from Taiwan
• Experiments and Surveys on Political Elites
• Reform preferences of key actors in the UNFCCC process
• Evidence of the unthinkable: Experimental wargaming at the nuclear threshold
• NATO’s Nuclear Types: Vulnerability, Defense Investment, and Alliance Strategy Preferences
• Redefining the Debate Over Reputation and Credibility in International Security
• Advisers and Aggregation in Foreign Policy Decision Making
• Out of the Loop Again: How Dangerous is Weaponizing Automated Nuclear Systems?

Related

• Signaling Foreign Policy Interests
• Diplomacy by committee: Assessing resolve and costly signals in group settings
• Credible leadership signals
• Avoiding Audience Costs: Domestic Political Accountability and Concessions in Crisis Diplomacy
• Making It Personal: The Role of Leader-Specific Signals in Extended Deterrence