Suchergebnisse

In the game-theoretic literature on international conflict, risk-acceptance leads to war if it is severe enough to eliminate the bargaining range, in which case war occurs even under complete information. I analyze the effect of varying risk-propensities in incomplete-information crisis bargaining. In this setting, an additional lottery (beyond just the war lottery) is involved due to the proposer's uncertainty about whether the proposal will be accepted. This has the effect that even small increases in either side's willingness to take risks increase the probability of war, as opposed to the all-or-nothing, eliminating-the-bargaining-range mechanism. This result holds regardless of whether either side is risk-averse or risk-acceptant on the whole, and even if no bargaining range is being eliminated. I also show that uncertainty about the opponent's risk-propensity can lead to war via a standard risk-return tradeoff, which is another way that risk-preferences can affect war and peace.

A deliberative committee is a group of at least two individuals who first debate about what alternative to choose prior to these same individuals voting to determine the choice. We argue, first, that uncertainty about individuals' private preferences is necessary for full information sharing and, second, demonstrate in a very general setting that the condition under which unanimity can support full information revelation in debate amounts to it being common knowledge that all committee members invariably share identical preferences over the alternatives. It follows that if ever there exists an equilibrium with fully revealing debate under unanimity rule, there exists an equilibrium with fully revealing debate under any voting rule. Moreover, the converse is not true of majority rule if there is uncertainty about individuals' preferences.

We study the formation of advocacy groups and how they can impact policy outcomes by revealing information about voters׳ preferences to uninformed political candidates. We conduct a laboratory experiment based on a two-candidate spatial electoral competition setting where the policy preferences of voters are (initially) unknown and change over time. In the control treatment candidates learn about the preferred policy of the median voter through the voting outcome of elections. In the advocacy treatments, voters can organize themselves into advocacy groups in order to reveal their policy preferences. We find that voters often overcome the collective action problem of forming an advocacy group. In fact, we observe the formation of both informative advocacy groups, which convey new information, and uninformative advocacy groups, which do not. Overall, advocacy groups significantly speed up the convergence to the preferred policy of the median voter. However, advocacy does not lead to higher earnings as the gains from faster convergence are offset by the costs of group formation.

In this article, we propose that age similarity preference (ASP) among employees increases workplace difficulties in an age-diverse environment. Individuals use social categorizations such as age groupings to help minimize uncertainty, cope with change, and deal with complexity. When placed in an age-diverse work environment, intergroup comparisons regarding age become more salient. We suggest that when a preference exists among employees to work and interact with those similar in age to themselves in an age-diverse workplace, this will lead to an increase in uncertainty, perceived workplace challenges, and subsequently conflict. Data were collected from 262 employees of an organization in the US Midwest to test our hypotheses. Using multiple mediation modeling, our results suggest that ASP influences the degree of conflict reported, and that uncertainty and perceived work-related challenges mediate the relationship between ASP and conflict. A post-hoc ANOVA analysis of our data also showed a significant relationship between employee age and ASP, indicating that this preference was more likely to be reported by individuals younger in age.

AbstractBenefit–cost analysis is widely used to evaluate alternative courses of action that are designed to achieve policy objectives. Although many analyses take uncertainty into account, they typically only consider uncertainty about cost estimates and physical states of the world, whereas uncertainty about individual preferences, thus the benefit of policy intervention, is ignored. Here, we propose a strategy to integrate individual uncertainty about preferences into benefit–cost analysis using societal preference intervals, which are ranges of values over which it is unclear whether society as a whole should accept or reject an option. To illustrate the method, we use preferences for implementing a smart grid technology to sustain critical electricity demand during a 24‐hour regional power blackout on a hot summer weekend. Preferences were elicited from a convenience sample of residents in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. This illustrative example shows that uncertainty in individual preferences, when aggregated to form societal preference intervals, can substantially change society's decision. We conclude with a discussion of where preference uncertainty comes from, how it might be reduced, and why incorporating unresolved preference uncertainty into benefit–cost analyses can be important.

Despite a flourishing literature on the European Parliament, we know surprisingly little about the micro-foundations of its politics. This text addresses that shortcoming by examining how individual legislators make policy choices, how these choices are aggregated, and what role parties and committees play in this process.