This book provides an incisive new look at the inner workings of the House of Representatives in the post-World War II era. Reevaluating the role of parties and committees, Gary Cox and Mathew McCubbins view parties in the House - especially majority parties - as a species of 'legislative cartel.' These cartels usurp the power, theoretically resident in the House, to make rules governing the structure and process of legislation. Possession of this rule-making power leads to two main consequences. First, the legislative process in general, and the committee system in particular, is stacked in favor of majority party interests. Second, because the majority party has all the structural advantages, the key players in most legislative deals are members of that party and the majority party's central agreements are facilitated by cartel rules and policed by the cartel's leadership. Debunking prevailing arguments about the weakening of congressional parties, Cox and McCubbins powerfully illuminate the ways in which parties exercise considerable discretion in organizing the House to carry out its work. This work will have an important impact on the study of American politics, and will greatly interest students of Congress, the presidency, and the political party system.

Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House

The study of social dilemmas is the study of the tension between individual and collective rationality. In a social dilemma, individually reasonable behavior leads to a situation in which everyone is worse off. The first part of this review is a discussion of categories of social dilemmas and how they are modeled. The key two-person social dilemmas (Prisoner's Dilemma, Assurance, Chicken) and multiple-person social dilemmas (public goods dilemmas and commons dilemmas) are examined. The second part is an extended treatment of possible solutions for social dilemmas. These solutions are organized into three broad categories based on whether the solutions assume egoistic actors and whether the structure of the situation can be changed: Motivational solutions assume actors are not completely egoistic and so give some weight to the outcomes of their partners. Strategic solutions assume egoistic actors, and neither of these categories of solutions involve changing the fundamental structure of the situation. Solu...

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SOCIAL DILEMMAS: The Anatomy of Cooperation

Negotiation as a Metaphor for Distributed Problem Solving

The provision of a sanctioning system as a public good

Les auteurs ont explore les effets structurant sur des decisions impliquant l'utilisation de ressources communes, en fonction de l'identite sociale, de la taille du groupe de sujets (N=88) et de la structure de decision

Choice behavior in social dilemmas: Effects of social identity, group size, and decision framing.

Multi‐person versions of Prisoner's Dilemma are widely applicable in the social sciences. Examination of two important classes of real‐world situations reveals that although both can appropriately be called Prisoner's Dilemma, they have incompatible payoff structures. Thus Prisoner's Dilemma games constitute an important but apparently ambiguous set of models. We therefore undertake a taxonomy of multi‐person Prisoner's Dilemma. Some aspects of the well‐studied two‐person case provide a useful beginning for the task. In the general multi‐person form, however, some properties of the two‐person game are found incompatible with others and so are dropped. Additional properties are suggested by strategic considerations and the associated social phenomena. We demonstrate interdependencies among the various properties and relate some of them to a simple graphical representation.

N‐person Prisoner's Dilemma†

To compare the effects of group size on cooperation, we introduce a class of simple multiperson games. These games can be regarded as n-person generalizations of the two-person prisoner's dilemma with expected value payoffs. In order to ensure that identical expected-value monetary alternatives are available to players in different-sized groups, we introduced a certain formal constraint on payoffs. Results of an experimental study comparing three-and seven-person groups show that the smaller-sized group is markedly more cooperative than the larger group. The primary emphasis of this paper is methodological. It demonstrates a technique to measure cooperation as a function of group size unconfounded by role-playing and utility considerations.

Group Size and Cooperation

Acquisition of cognitive compiling

Games as Models of Social Phenomena

We describe an expert system for resource allocation in a particular military domain. The system incorporates variants of several important techniques of artificial intelligence and makes the first use of the Merit system for question selection. This technique enables the system to direct the acquisition of information by finding questions with a high ratio of probable importance to difficulty. In the current application, each resource is a military weapon, each task to which such a resource can be allocated is firing at a military target, and the objective function is the expected reduction in value of targets. The coefficients that relate a particular resource to a particular task are not provided explicitly. Instead, in the first phase of the allocation process, the system uses a computation network to determine the effectiveness of each individual weapon against each prospective target. The network, built by a domain expert in advance, allows reasoning with logical, Bayesian, and expert-defined operators. After the calculation of individual effectiveness values, portions of an allocation tree are constructed to determine good allocation plans for the set of weapons. The individual effectiveness values are used to direct the traversal and pruning of the allocation tree.

Henry Hamburger

Papers

N‐person Prisoner's Dilemma†

Group Size and Cooperation

Acquisition of cognitive compiling

Games as Models of Social Phenomena

An expert system for a resource allocation problem