Brook no compromise: How to negotiate a united front

The forthcoming article “Brook no compromise: How to negotiate a united front” by Elaine Yao is summarized by the author below.

Coordination is a central challenge in politics. To pass legislative agendas, maintain authoritarian control, or respond to financial crises, political parties, ruling elites, and international organizations must first overcome internal disagreements over the correct path to take. However, the process by which organizations settle these disagreements – and the reasons they sometimes fail – is often hard to observe and poorly understood, particularly in settings where institutional rules and procedures do not impose clear structure on the coordination process.

This paper uses a dynamic game-theoretic model to explore how coordination occurs in such environments. The game centers on each side’s uncertainty over their counterpart’s willingness to compromise: would they accept a second-best outcome, or prefer to stick with the status quo if their favorite outcome is unavailable? The model captures a stylized setting in which players must choose when to “play hardball” – to make an irreversible commitment that removes an option from consideration. Such actions are both costly and risky: if miscalibrated, they can lock players into a mutually unfavorable status quo.

What the paper shows, however, is that hardball tactics also serve an informational function. Uncompromising actors reveal themselves by acting early, allowing more flexible actors to learn about their opponent’s type over time. The quality of this screening process – how fast and beneficial it is – is a crucial factor shaping coordination outcomes. Broadly speaking, faster screening reduces both uncertainty in coordination outcomes and avoidable miscoordination; noisier or less beneficial screening has the opposite effect.

One particularly interesting result is that when players are extremely different – in their capacity to play hardball, their prior beliefs about one another’s obstinacy, or their valuations of the status quo and potential reforms – both players have an incentive to stall longer. Preemptive incentives are strongest when players are on relatively equal footing, creating the highest incidence of avoidable miscoordination.

The model contributes to a growing literature on coordination under uncertainty, offering a tractable framework for analyzing how endogenous information acquisition and exogenous shocks (e.g., leaks of players’ willingness to compromise) affect timing, credibility, and welfare. It also helps explain real-world puzzles—such as failed legislative coalitions or fractured insurgencies—where actors appear to act too soon or too cautiously despite having shared interests. In doing so, the model shifts attention away from preference divergence or institutional design and toward the strategic logic of learning and commitment under informational frictions.

About the Author: Elaine Yao is a Ph.D candidate in Politics at Princeton University and an incoming assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Their research “Brook no compromise: How to negotiate a united front” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.