Max Abrahms, "The Credibility Paradox: Violence as a Double-Edged Sword in International Politics," International Studies Quarterly 2013.
Abstract: Implicit in the rationalist literature on bargaining over the last half-century is the political utility of violence. Given our anarchical international system populated with egoistic actors, violence is thought to promote concessions by lending credibility to their threats. From the vantage of bargaining theory, then, empirical research on terrorism poses a puzzle. For non-state actors, terrorism signals a credible threat in comparison to less extreme tactical alternatives. In recent years, however, a spate of studies across disciplines and methodologies has nonetheless found that neither escalating to terrorism nor with terrorism encourages government concessions. In fact, perpetrating terrorist acts reportedly lowers the likelihood of government compliance, particularly as the civilian casualties rise. The apparent tendency for this extreme form of violence to impede concessions challenges the external validity of bargaining theory, as traditionally understood. In this study, I propose and test an important psychological refinement to the standard rationalist narrative. Via an experiment on a national sample of adults, I find evidence of a newfound cognitive heuristic undermining the coercive logic of escalation enshrined in bargaining theory. Due to this oversight, mainstream bargaining theory overestimates the political utility of violence, particularly as an instrument of coercion.
I found this via Bruce Schneier's blog, which frequently features very valuable analysis clustered around societal and computer security.
This is only codifying the bias in reason. If this is as severe a feedback loop as your reasoning suggests, then rational agents aware of this bias are all too necessary to start disabling the feedback loop. Nobody "wins" a war; one side just gets their demands met to some degree. That's a far cry from "winning" by any utility function that values human life much.
By a feedback loop, do you mean a process whereby uses of violence are likely to provoke violent responses, making everybody less willing to compromise? If so, then I entirely agree that this is worth examining, and I wish I could figure out what I said that makes it seem like you think you are saying something I'd disagree with.