Behavior of a threatener: retaliation vs. fixed opportunity costs

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Harsanyi (1962) has suggested that costs are usually incurred by the wielder of power in his attempts to enforce compliance in the social influence process. For example, should one country attempt to impose its will upon another country by an act of war, certain costs related to the loss of men and materials would be incurred. Harsanyi refers to these losses as opportunity costs. Opportunity costs constitute, in effect, the self-imposed price paid by source as a function of his own influence attempts; as such, these costs are fixed and relatively voluntary. On the other hand, if the target of the influence attempt possesses retaliatory power, additional costs may be imposed upon the source which are neither voluntarily incurred, nor certain of occurrence, from source's point of view. The behavior sequence when the target is recalcitrant in a unilateral threat situation is threat, noncompliance, and punishment; but in a bilateral threat situation the sequence is threat, noncompliance, punishment, and retaliation. The additional target behavior of retaliation in a bilateral threat situation should either exacerbate the conflict or deter the sending of threats and/or their enforcement, and thus provide opportunities for conciliatory behavior. In either case, the target possessing retaliatory capacity should be perceived as more potent than the target who does not possess such power. In a relevant study, Deutsch and Krauss (1960) had pairs of subjects play a bargaining game in which they were told that each was an operator of a trucking company and that operating costs would be assessed on the basis of the time taken to deliver goods to a fixed destination. Conflict between the subjects was generated from the layout of available delivery routes; the shortest and hence most profitable route was a one-lane road which only one subject might traverse at a time. Given the basic paradigm, three conditions of threat were employed by providing gates to one, both, or neither of the subjects, which could be lowered to prevent the other from reaching his destination. Thus the three conditions of no threat, unilateral threat, and bilateral threat were established. The ability of subjects to reach agreements, as reflected by the magnitude of their joint payoffs, was inversely related to the amount of threat present. The power of the adversary is not easily determinable by the threatener in the trucking game studies. There is the possibility, for instance, of retaliation by the subject not possessing gates; he can park his truck in the one-lane road and thereby prevent the use of the shorter route by the subject who possesses a gate. There was also the uncertainty of retaliatory actions and their associated costs in the bilateral threat condition. Thus the opportunity costs to the source of threats are