Children learn to distinguish registers for different roles: talk as child versus as adult, as girl versus boy, as parent versus child, as teacher, as doctor, marking each “voice” with intonation, vocabulary, and speech acts. They learn to mark gender and status with each role; what counts as polite, how to address different people, how to mark membership in a speech community (e.g., family, school, tennis players, chess players), and how to convey specific goals in conversation. They reply on experts for new word meanings and identify some adults as reliable sources of such information. They mark information as reliable or as second-hand, through use of evidentials. They adapt their speech to each addressee and take into account the common ground relevant to each from as young as 1;6 on. They keep track of what is given and what new, making use of articles (a versus the), and moving from definite noun phrases (new) to pronouns (given). They learn to be persuasive, and persistent, bargaining in their negotiations. They give stage directions in pretend play. And they start to use figurative language. They learn how questions work at school. And they learn how to tell stories.

In previous chapters, the CSF is presented as a “black box” that encapsulates the rules and workings of the contest. This chapter explains the mechanisms behind this black box. This could include how efforts may translate, with some uncertainty, into performance, or a planner with given objectives such as designing a contest on television or procuring inputs for a firm. Additionally, the outcome of a conflict may be negotiated or decided by a jury once claims have been presented. Finally, the chapter explores the basic properties that a contest must have, such as the relationship between effort and probability of winning, and how these properties translate into different CSFs. This is known as the axiomatic approach. These different approaches are able to recover some of the main CSFs already presented in the previous chapter.

Divisions of labor are common among many species. They occur when some sets of individuals (usually defined by age or gender) regularly perform specific tasks, either as a result of individual decision-making patterned by social and ecological contexts (differences in labor), or emerging from an organized, cooperative task specialization designed to benefit a larger collective (divisions of labor). This chapter explores both differences in labor and divisions of labor by drawing on ethnographic cases of subsistence production. These case studies illustrate how intrinsic variation in size and strength may structure differences in labor by age, and they demonstrate how variation in the assessment of acquisition risk may influence women’s and men’s subsistence decisions. These differences may lead to true cooperative divisions of labor when team rates, bargaining, or signaling reduce conflicts of interest between individuals, in turn facilitating increased returns to scale for larger collectives, families, households, or other unit of economic production. Understanding the maintenance of patterns in "divisions of" and "differences in" labor provides a firmer foundation for explanatory models of human decision-making, ranging from questions about the emergence of our genus to contemporary patterning in occupational specialization and gender identity.

This chapter presents the bargaining model of war. The basic approach of the bargaining model is to frame the onset, prosecution, and termination of war as a bargaining process: war represents a failure of two sides to reach a peaceful bargain settling a dispute over an issue such as a territorial border, and during war states continue to bargain, searching for a peace settlement both sides prefer over continuing to fight. Using very little math, the chapter introduces a number of key concepts, such as ideal points, reservation points, reversion outcomes, and bargaining space. It also lays out three possible bargaining model explanations as to why wars break out: when the sides disagree about the likely outcome of a war; when at least one side doubts the credibility of the other side to abide by commitments to peace; and when the issue under dispute is perceived to be indivisible. The chapter also develops information and commitment credibility perspectives on bargaining during wartime, and how wars eventually end. It applies these ideas to a summary of a quantitative study of the effects of peacekeeping on civil war outcomes, and to a case study of World War II in the Pacific.

In the real world, when people play games, they often receive advice from those that have played it before them. Such advice can facilitate the creation of a convention of behavior. This chapter studies the impact of advice on the behavior of subjects who engage in a non-overlapping generational ultimatum game where, after a subject plays, she is replaced by another subject to whom she can offer advice. Our results document the fact that allowing advice fosters the creation of a convention of behavior in ultimatum games. In addition, by reading the advice offered, we conclude that arguments of fairness are rarely used to justify the offers of senders but are relied upon to justify rejections by receivers.

We set out the case for computational social science as opposed to traditional “pencil and paper” formal methods. The substantive theme of this book is the governance cycle in parliamentary democracies, but the ideas we put forward can be applied to many other areas of study.

We outline the core argument of the book and steps taken to establish this. We begin by sketching component parts of the governance cycle: election, government formation, and government survival. Noting that the analysis of this complex system is intractable for traditions deductive methods of formal modeling, we preview two different computational methods for analyzing it. First, we model “functionally rational” artificial agents who use simple but effective rules of thumbs to navigate their high stakes but complex environment (ABM). Second, we specify an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm which, by massively repeated self-play, teaches itself to find near-optimal strategies for playing what is in effect a traditional, but intractable, noncooperative game. We conclude by sketching the empirical approach we use to first calibrate and exercise the models on training data and then test them on out-of-sample test data.

The conclusion synthesizes and reflects upon the case studies and comparative and theoretical contributions in the book. The cases are organized around three categories: first, relatively conventional decentralization initiatives in which reforms were adopted to improve governance; second, contexts in which decentralization has been contemplated as a framework for self-determination for the region’s stateless communities; and finally, decentralization initiatives undertaken in the shadow of conflict and state fragmentation. This concluding chapter develops theoretical insights drawn from the rich terrain for qualitative comparison across these three contexts. It offers reflections on key characteristics of the shared regional context and a typology of factors driving decentralization in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. It argues that an important contribution of the volume lies in identifying a broader array of motivations for, and actors driving, decentralization than currently reflected in the scholarly literature and in parsing the implications for the institutional design of decentralized government. The chapter concludes by distilling patterns from the cases to identify distinct trajectories of decentralization that are evidenced in the MENA region and their entailments.

Chapter 2 presents a statement of the book’s theory. The geography and demography of the post-Soviet space suggests a strategic game with three actors, all second-guessing each others strategies: peripheral elites in Russian-speaking communities, “national” elites in the capital, and elites in the Kremlin. The output of bargaining processes is the distribution of symbolic cultural goods. The game is played in two stages. In the first, inside Russian-speaking communities, elites attempt to coordinate to threaten to secede, or not. In the second stage, bargaining takes place between the capital and the potentially seditious community. If bargaining breaks down, the Russian government might intervene. We outline the analytic narrative structure that organizes the remainder of the book. The theory is formalized in a mathematical appendix (Appendix A).

This chapter provides an overview of the application of competition law to workers in New Zealand. The chapter starts with a brief historical background to the relevant legislation regulating labour and competition, and then summarises the key provisions of the Commerce Act that apply to workers. It then specifically explores the application of competition law to collective action by independent contractors, focusing on the unusual legal position of film workers. New Zealand law in this area is currently in a state of transition. While the literature and case law is less developed than in other jurisdictions, there is draft legislation and a number of law reform proposals currently being considered by the Government. The chapter provides a brief survey of the proposed Screen Industry Workers Bill and the relevant law reform proposals being considered.

To explain how broader sections of the population than the nobility were included in Parliament we need to recapture the original character of representation as obligation. The chapter therefore presents the compellence model of obligation, which is predicated on ruler strength. The model is exemplified by the English case, which is traditionally taken as the paradigm for the alternative and most widely invoked model, which sees representation as the result of bargaining. Magna Carta is the classic historical precedent and it is here shown to depend on royal strength instead. The role of ruler strength and obligation is then further demonstrated by process-tracing the emergence of the English Parliament from the 1220s into the early 1300s. Though bargaining was pervasive, what channelled outcomes in a constitutional direction was the crown's capacity to enforce attandance across social orders. Bargaining was pervasive on the continent as well; what differed in England that the bottom-up requests for rights were preceded and followed by periods of strong royal capacity. The "fiscal fixation" of much social science thus needs to be revised. The institutional and, especially, judicial infrastructure in which state-society bargaining occurs is what shapes ultimate outcomes.

The final chapter in Part III examines more directly the claim that parliaments are a consequence of commercial activity by looking at two cases, which have dominated especially neo-institutionalist accounts due to their thriving wool trades, England and Castile. The main mechanism tying trade to representative institutions is that of capital mobility, which is assumed to endow mercantile groups with bargaining powers. The section on England shows that taxes on mobile capital were not key for representation, as they were not bargained for in Parliament. Indirect taxation was also far less than direct taxation in the critical period of parliamentary emergence. Moreover, bargains that did occur resulted in sectoral privileges, not constitutional gains. In fact, the chapter shows how mercantile interests and the collective action of merchants were endogenous to state capacity. The section on the Castilian Mesta shows how the assumed inefficiencies of this commercial system can be traced to the political weakness highlighted in chapter 5.

A superior bargaining capacity, especially of urban and commercial groups, is considered to be the foundation of representative institutions. However, in large polities like France and Castile, the pre-eminence of urban groups in representative institutions was causally related to the ultimate decline of those institutions and the devolution of the two regimes into "absolutism." The chapter first shows how the French Estates-General lapsed due to the greater weakness of the French crown; "divide et impera" is the preferred strategy of weak kings. "Absolutism" is the outcome, not the goal. French kings could not secure representatives armed with full powers, as local assemblies retained the right of tax approval. It is not that the demands of representation were weaker in France; urban groups often articulated even more radical claims. Absent the nobility, however, they failed to retain bargaining powers. Similar conditions operated in Castile. However, I show that greater early strength of the Castilian crown allowed some institutional layering and functional fusion to occur, which explains why the Castilian Cortes was more long-lasting and continuous than its French counterpart, a puzzle not hitherto explained.