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Published November 2010 | public
Journal Article

A simple mechanism for resolving conflict

Abstract

In Conflict Resolution situations where two parties with opposed preferences need to make a number of decisions simultaneously, we propose a simple mechanism that endows agents with a certain number of votes that can be distributed freely across issues. This mechanism allows parties to trade off their voting power across issues and extract gains from differences in the intensities of their preferences. The appealing properties of such a mechanism may be negated by strategic interactions among individuals. We test its properties using controlled laboratory experiments. We observe that equilibrium play increases over time and truthful/honest play decreases over time. The subjects almost reach the welfare predicted by the theory even when their behaviour is far from equilibrium. The fact that deviations from equilibrium do not do much damage to its welfare properties is a further argument in favour of the use of this mechanism in the real world.

Additional Information

© 2010 Elsevier Inc. Received 7 May 2009. Available online 13 February 2010. We are particularly indebted to Rosemarie Nagel, Antonio Cabrales and an anonymous referee. We thank Judith Avrahami, Antoni Bosch, Ayça Ebru Giritligil, Pablo Fleiss, Sergiu Hart, Libby Hunt, Humberto Llavador, Antonio Merlo, Tom Palfrey, Pedro Rey, Yosi Rinott, Julian Rode and seminar participants at a number of conferences for helpful comments and discussions. The second author would also like to thank the Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for their generous hospitality. We acknowledge financial support from the British Academy and Spain's Ministry of Education under Grants PB98-1076 and SEC2002-03403.

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 23, 2023