Langlois' Deterrence Game

The game is that from Jean-Pierre Langlois' paper Rational Deterrence and Crisis Stability published in the American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 35, No. 4, November 1991, Pp. 801-32. Default values are for the dovish stand of both players (i.e. states).

In all fields you can use 64-bit floating-point numbers. In the field for rho1/2 you can use 64-bit floating-point numbers plus the following arithmetic operators: + (add), - (minus), / (divide), * (multiply), ^ (power), preference as usual. Further you can use a variable x, which represents the players' last move. Brackets are not allowed.

The number of iterations is not limited, but remember the power of your CPU! If the number of iterations is greater than 75 the graphics for crisis utilities (V1,V2) will not depict all steps. This is because of the limited size of the coordinate system: in this version a special algorithm chooses as much steps as possible to build the graphics. Of course the precision of the graphics depends on the size of the coordinate system too.

By the way: The program is written in Java 1.1.3 and therefore problems can emerge with older browsers. I have tested it with Netscape 4.06 and it has run pretty well. Already Netscape 4.04 has some difficulties to digest the program.

I would appreciate it if you would send me your comment.


claus.wimmer@lrz-muenchen.de
Last modified: Wed Nov 11 17:42:37 MET 1998