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Experimental Games and Bargaining Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

T. C. Schelling
T. C. Schelling
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

Games have been used in the study of international politics; if they were not so demanding of time and energy, they would probably be used more. A Berlin crisis, or a busy day in the life of the United Nations, lends itself to this procedure. Participants usually represent “countries” and they may be encouraged to play the “role” of the country, acting as they believe the country would act, or they may be encouraged to behave in the game as they believe the country ought to behave in its own interest. The game may be organized for research, the participants being scholars and policy analysts; or it may be organized as training, to give students vicarious experience in the complexities of international politics.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 14 , Special Issue 1: The International System: Theoretical Essays , October 1961 , pp. 47 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1961

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References

1 The reason probably is that non-zero-sum games are no fun unless actual rewards are provided—i.e., unless the partners (competitors, rivals) can jointly beat the “house.”

2 See note 7 at the end of the paper for references to other experimental games.

3 A 1958 map of 48 states is used.

4 Reported in Schelling, T. C., “Bargaining, Communication, and Limited War,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 1 (March 1957), pp. 19–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; reprinted in Schelling, , The Strategy of Conflict, Cambridge, Mass., 1960.Google Scholar

5 Closely related is the idea that both sides must accept the “same” limits—a proposition that not only may prove false in actual play but can prove meaningless within the structure of the game unless the game itself is designed with a symmetrical move structure and scoring system. See, for example, King, James E. Jr, “Nuclear Plenty and Limited War,” Foreign Affairs, xxxv (January 1957), pp. 238–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For the symmetry notion in bargaining theory, see, for example, Harsanyi, John, “Approaches to the Bargaining Problem Before and After the Theory of Games,” Econometrica, XXIV (April 1956), pp. 144–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Duncan Luce, R. and Raiffa, Howard, Games and Decisions, New York, 1957, pp. 14ff.Google Scholar; and Schelling, T. C., “For the Abandonment of Symmetry in Game Theory,” Review of Economics and Statistics, XLI (August 1959), pp. 213–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Cf. Schelling, , The Strategy of Conflict, pp. 259–63.Google Scholar

7 A recent, fairly comprehensive description and discussion of less formalized “political games” that involve a good deal of free activity is in Goldhamer, Herbert and Speier, Hans, “Some Observations on Political Gaming,” World Politics, XII (October 1959), pp. 71–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar A much more tightly formalized game structure has been used by Harold Guetzkow (and described in papers presented to conferences at Northwestern University in April 1959 and West Point in June 1959). An extensive history of war gaming, especially in the nineteenth century and up to World War II (but with some discussion of more recent games), is in Young, John P., A Survey of Historical Developments in War Games, Washington, D.C., Operations Research Office, Johns Hopkins University, March 1959Google Scholar; another rather comprehensive discussion is in Thomas, Clayton J. and Deemer, Walter L., “The Role of Operational Gaming in Operations Research,” Operations Research, V (February 1957), pp. 1–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

A discussion of what war gaming can and cannot do is in Robert D. Specht, War Games, The RAND Corporation, Paper P. 1041, 1957. For a discussion of whether experimental games have, in principle, research validity in the sense of producing empirical evidence, see Herman Kahn and Irwin Mann, War Gaming, The RAND Corporation, Paper P-1167. (The present proposal, and the questionnaire experiments reported in the earlier article, are at variance widi the view expressed by Kahn and Mann.)

Some formalized one-move and two-move games, in some cases iterated through a series of plays, are reported in Deutsch, Morton, “Trust and Suspicion,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 11 (December 1958), pp. 265–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; in Flood, Merrill M., “Some Experimental Games,” Management Science, V (October 1958), pp. 5–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; in Lieberman, Bernhardt, “Human Behavior in a Strictly Determined 3 × 3 Matrix Game,” Behavioral Science, V (October 1960), pp. 317–22Google Scholar; in Sayer Minas, J., Scodel, Alvin, Ratoosh, Philburn, and Lipetz, Milton, “Some Descriptive Aspects of Two-Person Non-Zero-Sum Games,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, III (June 1959), pp. 114–19Google Scholar; and in Richard H. Willis and Myron L. Joseph, “Bargaining Behavior,” ibid., pp. 102–13.

Business games, which have come into vogue as training devices and as research tools, are usually nearer (in formalization) to the present game than the political games described by Goldhamer and Speier, are a degree more formal than the Guetzkow games, and are more like the older, highly stylized war games of the nineteenth century than like the war gaming presendy practiced. For a buying-and-selling game that was designed for and extensively used in research, see Siegel, Sidney and Fouraker, Lawrence E., Bargaining and Group Decision Maying, New York, 1960.Google Scholar

The game that comes closest in spirit to the one described in the present paper is probably the “balance of power” game described in Kaplan, Morton A., Burns, Arthur Lee, and Quandt, Richard E., “Theoretical Analysis of the ‘Balance of Power,’” Behavioral Science, V (July 1960), pp. 240–52.Google Scholar While it is oriented toward different bargaining phenomena than the present game, its rationale and mediodology are much the same, especially in the authors' interest in using it both as a “game” and as a “theoretical model.”