Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T00:10:13.815Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Alliance Formation in a Side-Taking Experiment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 August 2018

Peter DeScioli
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794-4392, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Erik O. Kimbrough
Affiliation:
Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy, Chapman University, Orange, CA 92866, USA e-mail: [email protected]

Abstract

We investigate in an economic experiment how people choose sides in disputes. In an eight-player side-taking game, two disputants at a time fight over an indivisible resource and other group members choose sides. The player with more supporters wins the resource, which is worth real money. Conflicts occur spontaneously between any two individuals in the group. Players choose sides by ranking their loyalties to everyone else in the group, and they automatically support the disputant they ranked higher. We manipulate participants’ information about other players’ loyalties and also their ability to communicate with public chat messages. We find that participants spontaneously and quickly formed alliances, and more information about loyalties caused more alliance-building. Without communication, we observe little evidence of bandwagon or egalitarian strategies, but with communication, some groups invented rank rotation schemes to equalize payoffs while choosing the same side to avoid fighting costs.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

We thank Morimitsu Kurino, Rahmi Ilkilic, Bettina Klaus, Rob Kurzban, Ronald Peeters, Dotan Persitz, Dave Porter, and Bart Wilson for comments. We thank participants in seminars at the University of Arkansas, Simon Fraser University, the New York Area Political Psychology Meeting, the NYU CESS Experimental Political Science Conference, and the Yale Center for the Study of American Politics Conference. We thank Ian Mark for computer programming of the experiment software. We thank Bay Mcculloch for research assistance. This research was supported by a grant from the International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics (IFREE). The authors declare no potential conflicts of interest. The data, code, and all analyses in this article are available at the JEPS Dataverse at doi: 10.7910/DVN/1KIEXG.

References

REFERENCES

Arnott, G. and Elwood, R. W.. 2009. “Assessment of Fighting Ability in Animal Contests.” Animal Behaviour 77: 9911004.Google Scholar
Aumann, R. J. 1974. “Subjectivity and Correlation in Randomized Strategies.” Journal of Mathematical Economics 1: 6796.Google Scholar
Axelrod, R. 1984. The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Baron, D. P. and Ferejohn, J. A.. 1989. “Bargaining in Legislatures.” American Political Science Review 83: 11811206.Google Scholar
Boehm, C. 1999. Hierarchy in the Forest. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Brandts, J. and Charness, G.. 2011. “The Strategy Versus the Direct-Response Method: A First Survey of Experimental Comparisons.” Experimental Economics 14: 375–98.Google Scholar
Cooney, M. 1998. Warriors and Peacemakers: How Third Parties Shape Violence. New York, NY: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Cooney, M. 2003. “The Privatization of Violence.” Criminology 41: 13771406.Google Scholar
Dechenaux, E., Kovenock, D., and Sheremeta, R. M.. 2015. “A survey of experimental research on contests, all-pay auctions and tournaments.” Experimental Economics, 18: 609669.Google Scholar
DeScioli, P. and Kimbrough, E. O.. 2018. “Replication Data for: Alliance Formation in a Side-Taking Experiment.” Harvard Dataverse. doi: 10.7910/DVN/1KIEXG.Google Scholar
DeScioli, P. and Kurzban, R.. 2009. “The Alliance Hypothesis for Human Friendship.” PLoS ONE 4: e5802.Google Scholar
DeScioli, P. and Kurzban, R.. 2013. “A Solution to the Mysteries of Morality.” Psychological Bulletin 139: 477–96.Google Scholar
DeScioli, P., Kurzban, R., Koch, E. N., and Liben-Nowell, D.. 2011. “Best Friends: Alliances, Friend Ranking, and the MySpace Social Network.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6: 68.Google Scholar
DeScioli, P. and Wilson, B. J.. 2011. “The Territorial Foundations of Human Property.” Evolution and Human Behavior 32: 297304.Google Scholar
Devine, D. J., Clayton, L. D., Dunford, B. B., Seying, R., and Pryce, J.. 2001. “Jury Decision Making: 45 Years of Empirical Research on Deliberating Groups.” Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 7: 622727.Google Scholar
Feldman, S. 2003. “Enforcing Social Conformity: A Theory of Authoritarianism.” Political Psychology 24: 4174.Google Scholar
Fischbacher, U. 2007. “z-Tree: Zurich Toolbox for Ready-Made Economic Experiments.” Experimental Economics 10: 171–8.Google Scholar
Fiske, A. P. 1992. “The Four Elementary Forms of Sociality: Framework for a Unified Theory of Social Relations.” Psychological Review 99: 689723.Google Scholar
Fowler, J. H. 2006. “Connecting the Congress: A Study of Cosponsorship Networks.” Political Analysis, 14: 456–87.Google Scholar
Fréchette, G. R. 2012. “Session-Effects in the Laboratory.” Experimental Economics 15: 485–98.Google Scholar
Fudenberg, D. and Tirole, J.. 1991. Game Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Hammerstein, P. and Parker, G. A.. 1982. “The Asymmetric War of Attrition.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 96: 647–82.Google Scholar
Heider, F. and Simmel, M.. 1944. “An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior.” The American Journal of Psychology 57: 243259.Google Scholar
Huddy, L. 2013. “From Group Identity to Political Cohesion and Commitment.” In The Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology, 2nd edition, ed. Huddy, L., Sears, D. O., and Levy, J.. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 737–73.Google Scholar
Kaukiainen, A., Salmivalli, C., Björkqvist, K., Österman, K., Lahtinen, A., Kostamo, A., and Lagerspetz, K.. 2001. “Overt and Covert Aggression in Work Settings in Relation to the Subjective Well‐Being of Employees.” Aggressive Behavior 27: 360–71.Google Scholar
Kimbrough, E. O. and DeScioli, P.. 2018. “Alliance Formation and Divided Loyalties.” Unpublished manuscript.Google Scholar
Konrad, K. A. 2009. Strategy and Dynamics in Contests. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Maynard Smith, J. 1982. Evolution and the Theory of Games. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
McAdams, R. H. 2008. “Beyond the Prisoners' Dilemma: Coordination, Game Theory, and Law.” Southern California Law Review 82: 209–58.Google Scholar
Mesterton-Gibbons, M., Gavrilets, S., Gravner, J., and Akçay, E.. 2011. “Models of Coalition or Alliance Formation.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 274: 187204.Google Scholar
Murnighan, J. K. 1978. “Models of Coalition Behavior: Game Theoretic, Social Psychological, and Political Perspectives.” Psychological Bulletin 85: 1130–53.Google Scholar
Ray, D. 2007. A Game-Theoretic Perspective on Coalition Formation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Richardson, D. S. 2014. “Everyday Aggression Takes Many Forms.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 23: 220–4.Google Scholar
Riker, W. H. 1962. The Theory of Political Coalitions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Schelling, T. C. 1960. The Strategy of Conflict. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Snyder, G. H. 1984. “The Security Dilemma in Alliance Politics.” World Politics 36: 461–95.Google Scholar
Snyder, G. H. 1997. Alliance Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Tajfel, H. and Turner, J. C.. 1979. “An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict.” In The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, ed. Austin, W. G. and Worchel, S.. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole.Google Scholar
Van Vugt, M. 2006. “Evolutionary Origins of Leadership and Followership.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 10: 354–71.Google Scholar
Vojnović, M. 2016. Contest Theory: Incentive Mechanisms and Ranking Methods. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Walt, S. M. 1987. The Origins of Alliance. Cornell, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Waltz, K. N. 1979. Theory of International Politics. New York: McGraw Hill.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

DeScioli and Kimbrough Dataset

Link
Supplementary material: File

DeScioli and Kimbrough supplementary material

DeScioli and Kimbrough supplementary material

Download DeScioli and Kimbrough supplementary material(File)
File 254 KB