Reproduced from the Science of International Politics, with kind permission of the authors and the Institute of International Studies, Tsinghua University.
Editor's Notes
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Since the end of the Cold War, the main focus of research for scholars of International Relations has been the theory of deterrence. Their main questions are: under what conditions do states attempt to deter? How do a state's efforts to deter affect the challenging state's beliefs? When is deterrence successful? Preferences, Information and the Deterrence Game by Xiang Ganghua and Wang Yongxian uses a game theoretic approach to answer these questions. The authors begin with a comparison of three main approaches to the study of deterrence: cost-benefit analysis; rational choice analysis; and game theory. They demonstrate the superiority