Coordination Dilemma Research Articles

A Unique European Governance Structure : Office of the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina Basis of Its Legitimacy and Controversial Accountability

In order to assess the successes and failures of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s (BiH) challenging road towards a fully functional democratic state aiming at membership in the European Union (EU), this paper examines the state-building process in BiH, and the transition from the post-Dayton political development, the work of the interim, ad-hoc political institution of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) in BiH, as well as the justification – if any - of its future existence and operation. Guided by the coordination dilemma, the research question of this paper is a reflection on the challenges of self-enforcing democratic institutions and how the OHR substitutes for it. This paper claims that the original purpose of the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) was to create a powerful yet limited institution of the OHR, one that is to be given sufficient power to institute behaviour, but is prevented from abusing its power. However, this purpose deviated in the years that followed the signing of the DPA, creating and institution which doings resemble liberal imperialism. The hypothesis of the paper is that the OHR has been abusing its power and that it is time to close it because it is no more a substitute for the self-enforcing democratic institutions. This paper claims that the problem of political officials’ lack of respect for the political and economic rights of citizens they administer, as investigated by Weingast, is one of the central features of the operation of the OHR in BiH. The novelty of the paper lies in the attempt to test if OHR could be a case that could serve as a very good field to test Weingast’s model (1997).

Research on collaborative innovation cooperation strategies of manufacturing digital ecosystem from the perspective of multiple stakeholders

The digital ecosystem has hastened the fusion of manufacturing and digital technology in realizing product and service value. However, due to the coordination dilemmas within the digital ecosystem such as risk sharing, competition and cooperation among stakeholders, this study aims to explore the collaborative innovation cooperation strategies of multiple stakeholders, and to investigate the interaction effects of differential incentives on each other's strategies. By constructing a dynamic differential game model, this study solves the optimal innovation efforts, digital servitization levels and innovation benefits under different cooperation intensities, and analyzes the influence of various factors on the total innovation benefits of the digital ecosystem. It is found that under different decision-making modes, the influence of incentive subsidy coefficient and cost-sharing coefficient on the innovation efforts and innovation benefits of multiple stakeholders is different. Under the decentralized decision-making mode, the incentive mechanism positively promotes the innovation efforts of both parties of cooperative enterprises, while the local government is not affected, while under the centralized decision-making mode, the incentive mechanism positively affects the innovation efforts and innovation benefits of all three parties. Specifically, under the Stackelberg game, both the innovation efforts and innovation benefits achieve Pareto improvement, while under the cooperative game, the total system innovation benefits reach Pareto optimality and the optimal strategy is realized. In addition, an optimal range exists for the benefit distribution coefficient and the policy guidance coefficient. Furthermore, factors like the cooperative benefit impact coefficient, innovation capability coefficient, and policy guidance coefficient have a positive effect on the total system innovation benefits. Conversely, factors like the discount rate, technology decay coefficient, and innovation input coefficient inhibit the growth of the total system innovation benefits. The value provides theoretical support for collaborative innovation cooperation in the digital ecosystem, thus facilitating the progress of digital transformation in manufacturing.

Emergence and collapse of reciprocity in semiautomatic driving coordination experiments with humans

Forms of both simple and complex machine intelligence are increasingly acting within human groups in order to affect collective outcomes. Considering the nature of collective action problems, however, such involvement could paradoxically and unintentionally suppress existing beneficial social norms in humans, such as those involving cooperation. Here, we test theoretical predictions about such an effect using a unique cyber-physical lab experiment where online participants (N = 300 in 150 dyads) drive robotic vehicles remotely in a coordination game. We show that autobraking assistance increases human altruism, such as giving way to others, and that communication helps people to make mutual concessions. On the other hand, autosteering assistance completely inhibits the emergence of reciprocity between people in favor of self-interest maximization. The negative social repercussions persist even after the assistance system is deactivated. Furthermore, adding communication capabilities does not relieve this inhibition of reciprocity because people rarely communicate in the presence of autosteering assistance. Our findings suggest that active safety assistance (a form of simple AI support) can alter the dynamics of social coordination between people, including by affecting the trade-off between individual safety and social reciprocity. The difference between autobraking and autosteering assistance appears to relate to whether the assistive technology supports or replaces human agency in social coordination dilemmas. Humans have developed norms of reciprocity to address collective challenges, but such tacit understandings could break down in situations where machine intelligence is involved in human decision-making without having any normative commitments.

Hierarchical Coordination of Transmission and Distribution System Operations in European Balancing Markets

We propose a hierarchical scheme for the coordination of transmission and distribution system operations, which is inspired by nested decomposition and tailored for integration in upcoming European balancing markets. We compare our proposal to a number of recent European research projects and pilots. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal in resolving a number of transmission-distribution coordination dilemmas, including conflict resolution between network operators, self-healing, sharing charges in mutually beneficial actions, and the recursive integration of distributed resources in pan-European balancing markets. We implement a proof-of-concept market clearing platform that can match transmission and distribution system market orders, cope with non-convexities in market offers and power flow constraints, scale to systems of realistic size, and respect the decentralization of communications and information sharing which is required in European electricity markets. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our platform on large-scale instances of the Italian and Danish power systems based on data sourced from the EU Horizon 2020 SmartNet project. We demonstrate the superiority of our approach to alternative coordination schemes in terms of economic efficiency, alignment of incentives and system security.

Toward a Super-COP? Timing, Temporality, and Rethinking World Climate Governance

Toward a Super-COP? Timing, Temporality, and Rethinking World Climate Governance

Ideas for macroeconomic surveillance: a comparative text analysis of country reports by global and regional financial organizations

Institutional proliferation in the global financial order raises concerns about a failure of coordination between global and regional organizations and the resulting confusion and conflict. One area of concern is macroeconomic surveillance, which is crucial for the detection of financial crises as a task subject to institutional overlaps. The existing literature does not provide systematic evidence on the extent and determinants of such coordination. To fill this lacuna, we compare the International Monetary Fund and the ASEAN Plus Three Macroeconomic Research Office, a surveillance agency in East Asia, using their country reports as outcomes of their surveillance of East Asian countries. We conduct dictionary-based text analyses to assess the usage patterns of key terms concerning particular economic ideas. The results demonstrate substantial similarities between the country reports as well as some residual differences. These findings suggest that they engage in informal coordination based on focal-point effects through the use of general and regional economic ideas for multifaceted surveillance. They further suggest that informality permits them to exercise discretion in deciding policy categories for aligned and autonomous actions, thereby providing an efficient solution to an autonomy–coordination dilemma. Through these discussions, our study suggests important implications for researchers and member governments.

What do infants need an ownership concept for? Frugal possession concepts can adequately support early reasoning about distributive dilemmas.

Boyer's model posits that ownership intuitions are delivered by combining input representations of resource conflict and cooperative value, necessary to solve coordination dilemmas over resource access. Here I evaluate the implications of this claim for early social cognition and argue that cognitively frugal possession concepts can be leveraged to the same inferential end, making the ascription of ownership proper unnecessary.

Overcoming coordination failure in games with focal points: An experimental investigation

We experimentally test whether increasing the salience of payoff-irrelevant focal points (Schelling, 1960) can counteract the negative impact of conflicts of interest on coordination. The intuition is that, in the presence of conflict, the solution to the coordination dilemma offered by the focal point loses importance. Increasing its salience increases its relevance and, therefore, coordination success. When we vary label salience between subjects, we find support for this conjecture in games with a constant degree of conflict, similar to battle of the sexes games, but not in games that feature outcomes with different degrees of payoff inequality and efficiency. In an additional experiment in which we vary label salience within subjects, choices are found not to be affected by our salience manipulation. Yet, the proportion of choices consistent with the focal point is significantly greater than that in the between-subject design.

‘Bigger’ after all? The Effect of Structural Policy Coordination Authorities on the Multidimensionality of Policy Output

AbstractTo be ‘bigger on big things’, Jean‐Claude Juncker reformed the European Commission's organizational set‐up by adding another hierarchical layer to its political sphere. Vice‐Presidents shall foster coordination between departmental Commissioners when drafting policies so that these are more multidimensional in kind. Taking an actor‐centred organization theoretical perspective, complemented by principal–agent reasoning, we conceptualize these as structural policy coordination authorities. We hypothesize that this organizational manipulation to a core executive's typical multidivisional set‐up incentivizes silo‐focused actors to coordinate more across policy sectors. Hence, the coordination dilemma that typically confronts core executives might be counteracted, resulting in more multidimensional policy output. Constituting a ‘case in time’, we assess whether Commission policy output has changed systematically after the Juncker reform. Using newly developed indicators for policy multidimensionality, we evaluate all legislative proposals developed under the Juncker and Barroso II Commissions. We find that proposals under Juncker are indeed ‘bigger’ than before.

Focal points in multiple threshold public goods games: A single-project meta-analysis

This paper is a single-project meta-analysis of four experiments that first model charitable giving as individual contributions to a multiplicity of competing threshold public goods. Given the centrality of the coordination dilemma as the number of recipients increases, we pool 15,936 observations at the individual level for the purpose of identifying the most effective focal points, their mechanics, and their implications for donors’ wealth. We find that competition between public goods implies massive coordination problems that originate from fewer contributions and result in lower profits. In this setting, the most powerful coordination device turns out to be the existence of a single contribution option that stands out on its merits. We also observe an inverted U-shaped trend in the successful provision of public goods, offering evidence for experience as a focal point peculiar to the multiple-public-good framework. The effective focal points do not leverage greater contributions to solve the coordination dilemma, yet they generate higher earnings. Finally, delegation proves to be a sound device for reducing the risk of miscoordination as long as the delegate is formally obliged to pass along a high enough percentage of the transferred resources. We discuss possible implications of our findings.

Concessionary federalism in a dominant party system? Indirect tax reforms and subnational acquiescence in India

ABSTRACT What accounts for subnational assent to policies that seek to reduce their fiscal autonomy and increase fiscal centralization? Since subnational actors with access to veto capabilities can block such reforms, the key to this theoretical puzzle lies in the identification of those conditions that create weak veto possibilities. This article seeks to solve this puzzle by analysing the case of India which has amended the constitution to introduce a ‘dual GST’ system. The combined logic of a market economy paradigm – within which the realization of a common economic market was an important policy goal – and the logic of a ‘dominant party equilibrium’ – which reduced the number and impact of veto players – created the right conditions for intergovernmental coordination. However, even under these conditions, the coordination dilemma, which had plagued the indirect tax reform process since 1991, could not have been resolved without making compromises as midpoints of competing claims. Thus, even under a dominant party system, the institutional condition of federalism cannot be ignored entirely. Overall, India’s transition to a goods and services tax (GST) regime is a classic case of the centre and the states pooling sovereignty over the taxes assigned to them. This has strengthened the ‘shared rule’ dimension of Indian fiscal federalism.

Feeling Joint Ownership of Agency: The Normative Aspect of Agency Transformation

AbstractTeam reasoning is the idea that we can think as a ‘we’ and this can solve some coordination dilemmas, such as Hi-Lo. However, team reasoning can only solve the dilemmas it is intended to solve if the conditions for team reasoning warrant the belief that others will also perform team reasoning and these conditions cannot render team reasoning otiose. In this paper, I will supplement the theory of team reasoning by explaining how agency transformation also involves a change in the normative attitude. To do this, I will use the theory of affordances, which is the idea that the environment provides ways to interact with it. I will argue that when a person perceives as a group member, she associates herself and the other members with the group’s mosaic of affordances. This triggers a feeling of joint ownership of the agency. It is the feeling that it is up to us to deal with the situation, so we feel entitled to demand each other to cooperate. It warrants the belief that others are team-reasoners without rendering team reasoning otiose. This means that the agency transformation (fromItowe) involves a change in the normative attitude.

The social costs of titling land: Evidence from Uganda

• Survey data from Uganda shows mixed evidence of social costs to landholders from titling, dependent on model specification. • Interview evidence indicates social costs may take the form of neighbors or family refusing to assist with harvesting crops. • Afrobarometer data indicates a negative relationship between influence of customary leaders and amount of titled land. Why do some African landholders title their land, while others refrain from doing so? Existing explanations for the evolution of property rights focus on the costs of titling and the degree of enforcement by the state. I suggest a complementary explanation, based on the social costs of titling. In much of Africa, titling equates to removing land from customary authority, which governs multiple domains of social and economic life; actions in one domain bring costs in the others. I cast the decision to title as a coordination dilemma among a community of landholders, rather than an individual choice made in isolation. I test this theory using original survey and interview data from Uganda. A series of logit and probit estimates of data on titling are consistent with the social costs theory, dependent on model specification. Interview evidence indicates that social costs have a marginal effect on titling decisions; this is further supported with an examination of empirical implications at the country level across Africa using Afrobarometer data. The results indicate the need for more empirical tests to establish the conditions under which social costs have the greatest impact. This paper adds to our understanding of institutional change over time, as well as the persistence of customary authority in Africa.

Institutions and demotions: collective leadership in authoritarian regimes

Like any other regime, authoritarian regimes mutate. Many of these mutations depend upon the upshot of internecine elite conflicts. These condition the ability of a ruler or would-be ruler to seize state resources and acquire the capacity to exercise violence. It is therefore crucial to investigate the factors that shape the dynamics and outcomes of contention among elite groups in authoritarian regimes. This article pursues this line of investigation by examining from a micro-analytical, process-oriented, and phenomenological perspective how institutions of collective leadership affect power struggles in oligarchic power configurations. Drawing on the case of Serbia in the late 1980s, the following inquiry lays bare three institutional effects. First, collective organs of deliberation and decision-making channel intra-elite contention by defining the arenas in which elite members expect contention to take place (channeling effect). Second, by exacerbating actors’ mutual awareness and coordination dilemma, the forum setting of these collective organs lends itself to the emergence of open-ended situations (indeterminacy effect). Third, the verdicts delivered by institutions of collective leadership shape elite members’ expectations about group allegiance (collective alignment effect). In conjunction with this sequential argument about impact, the present article engages the conceptualization of authoritarian regimes, the analysis of institutional effects, and the study of delegitimation in an interactional setting.

Cross‐level coordination among international organizations: Dilemmas and practices

This article contributes to the understanding of inter‐agency coordination among international organizations, conceived as international public administrations (IPAs). We adopt a practice‐based approach to study the dilemmas of coordination across levels of government in the empirical setting of United Nations agencies involved in field‐level development activities. Based on elite interviews in both pilot countries and agency headquarters, complemented by extensive archival analysis, we track the emergence of a specific type of coordination dilemma that has been understudied, that is, the dilemma of inter‐ and intra‐agency coordination. We identify two sets of coordinating practices that aided in balancing the dilemma, that is, ‘systemic thinking’ and ‘jointly mobilizing resources and consensus’, and we discuss the organizational factors mediating the perception of each set of practices.

A bird in the hand: Temporal focal points and change in international institutions

This article develops a theoretical explanation for the timing of change in international institutions. It provides a rational choice response to key insights of historical institutionalist scholarship. Many existing theories—such as rational choice and sociological institutionalisms—explain the timing of change mainly by listing its causes. An analysis of the timing of change in many realms of institutional activity, however, demonstrates that incentives to alter institutions frequently accumulate, unaddressed for extended periods of time. The result is persistent institutional suboptimality, punctuated intermittently by phases of transformation. To account for divergence from the expectations of existing theories, I test two hypotheses concerning the role of transaction costs and temporal coordination dilemmas in hindering change. Introducing the concept of Temporal Focal Points, the article explains why temporal landmarks, such as international crises and prominent anniversaries, are frequently associated with non-linear, transformative change. To assess the explanatory potential of this framework, I analyze the record of change in United Nations environmental institutions. The case study supports the hypotheses advanced, leading to the conclusion that the when of institutional change can tell us a lot about the why of change.

Fundamental theoretical and practical investigations of the polymorph formation of small amphiphilic molecules, their co-crystals and salts

Abstract The amphiphilic nature of benzoic acid, benzoates and benzamide causes an unexpected rich polymorphism. Featuring rather rigid and small molecular structures these compounds are ideal model systems for gaining a more fundamental understanding of molecular polymorphism by systematic and concerted investigations. The hydrophilic head allows for hydrogen bonding while the phenyl moiety gives rise to various π-stacking modes. Variations of hydrogen bonding versus π-stacking modes give rise to four polymorphs of benzamide. The central synthon in all phases is a dimer where hydrophilic units form double hydrogen bonds. As suggested by MD simulations of the nucleation process, variations of the crystallization conditions trigger whether the first self-assembly occurs via the hydrophilic head or the hydrophophic tail groups. Based on NMR crystallographic investigations for the co-crystallization of benzamide with benzoic acid, we observed yet another variation of the balance of the two dominating intermolecular interactions leading to the formation of a 1:1 co-crystal. The average crystal structure resembles the packing motive of pure benzoic acid with alternating ribbons of homogenous benzamide and benzoic acid dimers. For alkali-benzoate salts a coordination dilemma arises that is of general importance for many active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). A 1:1 stoichiometry requires condensation of coordination polyhedra of small inorganic cations which in turn causes steric stress that varies with the relative volumes of cation and anion. Interestingly, one way of resolving the dilemma is microphase separation which is directly related to the amphiphilic character of benzoate.

The coordination of policy priorities among regional institutions from the Baltic Sea to the Arctic: the institutions – coordination dilemma

ABSTRACTWe examine the coordination of policy priorities among the Arctic Council, the Barents Euro-Arctic Council, the Council of Baltic Sea States, and the Nordic Council of Ministers. The member states of these groups established these institutions to coordinate their regional cooperation. However, the member states ended up having to coordinate the parallel work of these institutions. This coordination effort influenced their cooperation, creating an institutional coordination dilemma. We analyze how interests, leadership, and identity politics influence this dilemma and how negative, problem-solving, and positive forms of coordination can amend its effects regarding the temporal consistency of policy priorities and their sectoral overlap.

Reforming Rulemaking and Enforcement Mechanisms of International Financial Law

International financial law (IFL) is evolving from a situation of acquiesced anarchy (characterised by coordination dilemmas, compliance gaps and unwarranted independence of regulators) towards a more ordinate and coordinated framework. The conceptual crisis of the New International Financial Architecture (NIFA) and the failure of the system of global division of regulatory labour between international financial institutions (IFIs), international setting bodies and national regulatory authorities have left a vacuum of power and mandate. Hints of a shift in the global governance of financial markets are acknowledged in the reform of the Financial Sector Assessment Program (FSAP) and in the potential role of the Reports on Observance of Standards and Codes (ROSCs), jointly administered by the IFIs. The central role of the Financial Stability Board (FSB) as global coordinator has significantly reinforced the functions of monitoring and rationalizing implementation (i.e., with a creative result) of international regulatory standards, in combination with surveillance mechanisms by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In addition, FSB’s constituency under the G-20 is likely to render its political mandate as more acceptable by Members and stakeholders. However, although the framework created in the aftermath of the financial crisis may allow for coordinated solutions, effective action by governments is - as a matter of fact - missing. This notwithstanding, IFL has largely achieved authoritative characters, in so far as it can determine outcomes and compel obedience. Proceeding from Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann’s posture that international economic law has failed to effectively protect public values and to ensure participatory democracy and global justice, while international law has historically protected individuals from governmental intervention and power abuse, the legitimacy of IFL is critically investigated. To this extent, the Author addresses the superseded theory of Transnational Regulatory Networks (TRNs), which has been partially resumed by the Informal International Lawmaking (IN-LAW) project, the compensatory approach advocated by the Global Administrative Law (GAL) scholarship, and a democratic-striving approach. The Author eventually resorts to public enforcement remedies by virtue of a renovated role of the intergovernmental (‘ministerial’) cooperation and public international law solutions.

Constitutional Conflict in Hong Kong Under Chinese Sovereignty

The protracted constitutional conflicts between the Chinese state and Hong Kong society over the pace and form of democratization have become a source of political instability. This article sheds new light on these dynamics by analyzing the two sides as locked in a coordination dilemma: both have important common interests to coordinate with each other, but both rank in divergent ways their preferences for and against introducing competitive electoral arrangements into Hong Kong. It is shown how the unwillingness of either side to compromise has caused the gradual breakdown of coordination as focal points like the Basic Law have eroded, culminating in the Umbrella Revolution of 2014, the largest and longest-lasting popular movement in Hong Kong history. The bloodless ending of the Movement is chronicled, along with the persistence of political stalemate in this highly anomalous polity, known throughout the world for its combination of genuine civil liberties with authoritarian rule.