Modeling relationships in three-way conflict analysis with subsethood measures

Abstract

The relations on agents and issues are essential topics in three-way conflict analysis. While there is a general agreement on the formulation and understanding of relations regarding individual agents and issues, different opinions have been proposed when it involves agent or issue sets. On the one hand, these opinions provide diverse perspectives on interpreting the relations, enriching approaches to other essential topics in conflict analysis, such as finding a feasible strategy for a group of agents. On the other hand, a general and unified framework still needs to be developed in order to investigate the relations systematically and uniformly. Based on the quantitative subsethood measures, this work presents such a framework and conducts a comprehensive and systematic study of the relations in conflict analysis. We pay particular attention to the agent relations with respect to a set of issues and the relations between individual agents and issue sets, which are in the spotlight of the existing works. For each of them, we present a general formulation of the relations using subsethood measures and show that a few popular existing formulations could be explained and formulated under the presented formulation.