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Log in. At the beginning of the game, a legislator is randomly chosen to make a proposal. A chosen legislator gets to propose a division of the benefits across all legislative districts, and the rest of the legislators get to vote yes or no for the proposal. When one makes a proposal, then it is brought to a vote, and following the simply majority rule, the proposal passes or fails. When the proposal passes, the legislature adjourns, the benefits are allocated as proposed, and the game ends.
When the proposal fails to garner a majority of votes, another random draw is made, and another one out of n legislators is chosen to make a proposal. The game continues until a proposal is voted to pass. The benefit is discounted by a discount term, meaning that a legislator prefers the benefit in the present legislative session over the same benefit in the next legislative session.
Solving the game involves the backward induction procedure. Baron and Ferejohn find that there are multiple Nash equilibria and multiple subgame perfect Nash equilibria in this game, and they suggest a refinement. The refined solution concept that they provide to generate unique predictions for the game is called stationary sub game perfect Nash equilibrium. Essentially, the refinement provides a restriction such that only the strategies that are time independent remain. The stationary subgame perfect Nash equilibrium suggests that under the closed rule, only a minimum winning coalition is formed.
Thus, the randomly chosen proposer enjoys a huge advantage since he or she can bring approximately half of the entire benefits to his or her district. The chosen legislators, who vote yes, can bring some benefits to their districts. The remaining half of the legislators do not receive any allocation of benefits and vote no but fail to stop the bill from passing. Since the publication of the Baron and Ferejohn model, a number of studies have built on the initial model.
For instance, Baron considers a similar model with taxation coming into the utility function of each legislator. More recently, Volden and Wiseman consider legislative bargaining over division between collective goods and particularistic goods, then the distribution of particularistic goods. Overall, these series of studies of legislative bargaining have contributed to our understanding of legislative bargaining and the importance of legislative rules and institutional settings.
In international politics, game theory has been used in illustrating the logic of anarchy and explaining the importance of relative and absolute gains, causes of war, problems of credible commitments and signals, the role of mediators in international conflicts, and the role of international organizations in various contexts.
One of the pioneers in international relations is Bruce Bueno de Mesquita , In a series of articles and books published since the late s, he has made major contributions in the study of war and peace by modeling the decision making of a rational foreign policy maker to initiate a military conflict with an expected utility framework.
Fearon questions why states go to a war even if waging a war is seemingly not an optimal choice for either state in most conflict cases. Capturing a war between states as a bargaining, he points out that agreeing on a division of a coveted good, such as a piece of territory, without fighting a war is often optimal for both states, rather than fighting a war and dividing the coveted good.
Fearon then provides several conditions under which states might go to war even if there is a potential bargaining space where both are better off without fighting a war. The game theoretic model of war by Fearon features two players, State A and State B, who have preferences over a set of issues, such as a disputed territory, represented by the interval between 0 and 1. State A prefers issue resolutions closer to 1 while State B prefers resolutions closer to 0. And let c for each state be the cost of a war, due to battle casualties, revenue spent on a war, and destruction caused by a war, assuming c positive means that a war is costly for each state.
In its simplest form, the game flows as follows. At the beginning of the game, State A demands the division of 1, called x. State B receives the demand x from State A and chooses whether it wants to fight or back down.
With slight modifications to the model, Fearon shows that there are three possible explanations for war. First, rational leaders may choose to go to war because they cannot locate a mutually acceptable settlement because of private information about the probability of winning and incentives to misrepresent private information. Second, rational leaders may decide to wage a war because of a commitment problem. Even if both states can agree on the terms of settlement, the division of 1, there is no enforcement mechanism in international politics that prohibits the state that becomes stronger after the settlement to demand more in the future.
Anticipating this, the state on the losing side may prefer fighting a war to agreeing on the settlement. Finally, states may find it difficult to find a peaceful settlement because the issues under contest are indivisible. For instance, Alastair Smith offers a similar war model with each battle providing additional information about the probability of winning a war for both sides and both states making optimal decisions with updated beliefs about the probability of winning a war.
There are a large number of studies in comparative politics that use game theoretical models to capture democratic policy making, with particular focus on comparisons between different institutional structures used across democracies. These institutional features include electoral systems such as specific voting rules and electoral district sizes, party systems, and relations between the legislature and bureaucrats. Other applications of game theory in comparative political settings include democratization and market reforms, especially how an incumbent government and an opposition interact in these political and economic transitions.
Geddes provides one such model. She develops a game theoretic model of bureaucratic reform in Latin American democracies where politicians interact in deciding whether to support administrative reform. She derives propositions that reforms are more likely to occur when patronage is evenly distributed among the strongest parties and when the electoral weight of the strongest parties remains stable. She then tests the predictions with brief case studies of five Latin American countries.
One of the more well-known game theoretic models in comparative politics is the article by David Austen-Smith and Jeffrey Banks published in the American Political Science Review. As voters vote in anticipation of policy outcomes such as tax, education, and health policies and as policies are determined within a legislature where rational politicians condition their policy platforms on the prospect of electoral success, the two processes are clearly linked, and modeling both political processes simultaneously certainly advances a better understanding of elections and policy making in a legislature.
In their game, there are three parties competing for votes from n voters. At the onset of the game, the parties simultaneously declare their policy positions over a one-dimensional policy space. This one-dimensional policy space can conveniently be thought of as the left—right ideology spectrum. When the parties announce their respective positions, n voters cast their votes for parties.
The electoral system is the proportional representation adopted in some European countries, and legislative seats are allocated to each party according to the proportion of votes that each party receives if a party receives more than s votes. In their model, Austen-Smith and Banks assume that every party receives at least s votes to reduce unnecessary complication of the model.
When seats are allocated by the numbers of votes that each party receives, the parties try to form a government. The party with the largest number of seats first proposes a composition of the governing coalition, distribution of benefits among coalition members, and a policy to be implemented.
On receiving the proposal, the members of the coalition either accept the proposal or reject the proposal. When the members of the coalition accept the coalition, the coalition government is constituted with the proposed policy subsequently implemented.
If the members of the coalition reject the coalition proposal, then the party with the second- largest number of votes proposes a coalition, a policy, and a distribution of benefits. If the proposed package is accepted by the members of the coalition, the government coalition is formed, the benefits are distributed, and the policy is implemented accordingly. If the proposed package is not accepted, then the last party gets to make a proposal. If a coalition government is still not formed after the last party makes a proposal, then a caretaker government is implemented that makes equitable policy and benefit-distribution decisions.
Voters are assumed to be policy oriented, with their utility functions defined such that they prefer a policy closer to their own ideal policies. Parties are assumed to enjoy allocated benefits when they are included in a coalition government, and parties want to minimize the distance between their electoral platforms and the implemented policy. Solving the game is complicated but logically straightforward since one needs only to follow the backward induction methods presented previously.
In the equilibrium, it will always be the case that the majority party, if one exists, forms a government by itself, and if the party with the highest number of seats does not enjoy a majority, then the parties with the highest and the lowest number of seats form the governing coalition. This is because the party with the highest number of seats finds it cheaper to offer a coalition to the party with the lowest number of seats. This research paper provides a gentle introduction to game theory.
As a tool for researchers to deduce logically consistent hypotheses, game theory has been widely used in many different social science contexts. Basic terms and elements of game theory and the most important solution concepts are introduced with some sample applications.
Then three representative examples in political science are provided in the latter part of the research paper. One can see that game theoretic models can be used to study many interesting political phenomena, including legislative bargaining in American politics, decisions to go to war in international relations, and formation of coalition governments in comparative politics. For its relatively short history in political science, the influence of game theory on the ways in which researchers approach research questions has been substantial.
There are also ongoing innovations in game theoretic applications in political science that look very promising. One such innovation is to incorporate insights from psychological research in specifications of utilities for players and their ways of processing information. Another innovation is to allow players in a model to make various errors. Often referred to as bounded rationality models, these models are often made to allow better reflection of reality in a model.
Also innovative in political science is an effort to test theoretically generated insights empirically.
Often dubbed empirical implications of theoretical models, there have been impressive attempts to bridge the gaps between theoretical propositions and empirical testing, including statistical and qualitative research methods.
It is well acknowledged in political science that a multimethod approach to a given research question often yields a better result, and the ongoing effort to bring these theoretical and empirical research tools to study a research topic will certainly help us better understand and analyze complex political phenomena.
But, it can also be bad if not in moderation. The government should also pay attention and give restrictions on online games to control violence and obscenity that is not good of young gamers. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Email address. First Name. Last Name. This site, like many others, uses small files called cookies to help us improve and customize your experience. Learn more about how we use cookies in our cookie policy.
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