> Argumentation > Outcome and Concession > arghXiv:2604.11238
Termination Rates in Two-Party Disputes Under a Twenty-Four-Hour Criterion
View PDF: Termination Rates in Two-Party Disputes Under a Twenty-Four-Hour CriterionAbstract: Reported termination rates for two-party disputes are low, and we suggest this is an artefact of the observation window rather than a property of the disputes. A criterion requiring fourteen days of silence cannot distinguish a terminated dispute from an unattended one, and will record the second as the first only after two weeks in which nothing whatever is learned. We apply a twenty-four-hour criterion to 340 disputes drawn from eleven channels. Three hundred and twenty terminated, a rate of 94.1 per cent, with a median interval from opening to termination of 31 hours. Two hundred and twenty-seven of the terminated disputes were followed by further messages between the same participants on the same matter; each such episode was counted as a new dispute, on the criterion above, giving a mean of 4.2 disputes per dyad over the study period. We recommend the criterion be adopted generally.