There has been mounting consternation regarding the recent threats of violent escalation by Somali pirates in response to the successful—yet deadly—rescue operation undertaken by the U.S. Navy. As the AP reports:
“From now on, if we capture foreign ships and their respective countries try to attack us, we will kill them (the hostages),” Jamac Habeb, a 30-year-old pirate, told The Associated Press from one of Somalia’s piracy hubs, Eyl. “(U.S. forces have) become our No. 1 enemy.”
While this rhetoric serves pirates’ purposes, in conveying a menacing facade, if we view the history of events leading up to these statements through the prism of rational choice we can easily identify them as simple cheap-talk.
Consider each pirate incident as a sub-game in a indefinitely repeated game between a pirate group and a state entity. The pirate group can either be of the type that is willing to use violence to get its reward, or not. In each stage of the repeated game, the pirates send a message to the state stating their type. The state then decides whether to use force to end the incident based on this signal.
Now, extend this simple model onto the events that have occurred over the past several month off the Somali coast. Up to recently, the game had been in equilibrium; the state’s posterior belief at each stage [hostage event] about the pirates’ type was that they were willing to use violence, and as such gave into their demands to rescue the hostages to minimize the loss of life (i.e., maximize the state’s utility). Over the weekend, however, the U.S. Navy took an off-equilibrium action by attacking the pirates to rescue the hostages. In knocking the system out of equilibrium, the dynamics of the system become more well-defined. In the old equilibrium, the use of violence was ex ante inefficient for pirates, since they were able to maximize their utility without using it. The use of violence, then, becomes a costly signal for the pirates, as it reveals tactics, capabilities and weaknesses.
This more robust understanding of the dynamics provides insights into the pirates’ actual type; that is, pirates were either always willing to use violence, but did not do so in the old equilibrium because it was costly; or, they never were willing to and never will be, because thei beliefs about the state’s willingness to use violence had been made clear, and killing hostages in the future will not increase their reward.
Regardless of this distinction, the threat of violence is clearly cheap-talk, since it does not inform the state of the pirates’ type, and should not affect their actions. Put plainly, the pirates are either threatening the status quo (continued willingness to use violence), or are making a non-credible threat (new willingness to use violence). Any future policies to cope with the pirate situation in Somali, therefore, should not use these threats as a foundation as they reveal nothing about pirates’ willingness to use violence.
Update: Interesting discussion on how the ‘game’ has changed at orgtheory.net
Special thanks to @ChrisAlbon @ryanbriggs @pattonmat and @NYkrinDC for the lively exchange on Twitter earlier today that inspired this post.
Photo: sitfu.com
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Drew,
I think you make an interesting point about pirates and cheap talk, but I wonder if there is an additional story to be told here. It may be useful to draw an analogy to labor markets. We can imagine that pirates participate in pirateering as an alternative to other forms of employment. Their decision to participate as a pirate probably resembles something akin to the following: expected value of pirateering= (prob. success X value of ship(s)) – (prob. failure X how bad the negative outcome is). If their expected value of pirateering is higher than alternative employment (fairly low reservation wage), they participate as pirates. The U.S. Navy’s action in effect raises the price of a negative outcome (assuming prob failure stays the same). What are the implications of this market for pirates? Well, some people are better at being pirates than others. So pirates who are better able to mitigate the risk of failure may participate at higher rates in the pirateering market. So, the “quality of pirates” may go up. Another outcome, may be that “cheap talking” pirates as you put it, may be priced out of the pirating labor market, so the resolve (and possibly violence) of pirates will go up. Just a couple of thoughts.
-Thomas
[Reply]
That’s an excellent point, and something I had not considered. My wonder is that if there are any pirates that are so “good” they are willing to take the risk of certain death, with an uncertainty about reward, now that the state has made clear its willingness to use violence. The rational choice model would predict they would find a new avenue to get rewards.
Unfortunately, only the next pirate incident will tell us.
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