Core Coalition Research Articles

Humans and the core partition: An agent-based modeling experiment.

Although strategic coalition formation is traditionally modeled using cooperative game theory, behavioral game theorists have repeatedly shown that outcomes predicted by game theory are different from those generated by actual human behavior. To further explore these differences, in a cooperative game theory context, we experiment to compare the outcomes resulting from human participants' behavior to those generated by a cooperative game theory solution mechanism called the core partition. Our experiment uses an interactive simulation of a glove game, a particular type of cooperative game, to collect the participant's decision choices and their resultant outcomes. Two different glove games are considered, and the outputs from 62 trial games are analyzed. The experiment's outcomes show that core coalitions, which are coalitions in a core partition, are found in about 42% of games. Though this number may seem low, a trial's outcome is more complex than whether the human player finds a core coalition or not. Finding the core coalition depends on factors such as the other possible feasible solutions and the payoffs available from these solutions. These factors, and the complexity they generate, are discussed in the paper.

Computerized agents versus human agents in finding core coalition in glove games

One of the challenges for agent-based modeling is being able to incorporate human behavior. Human behavior is a multifaceted phenomenon, with strategic coalition formation being one form. A hybrid agent-based modeling approach, called ABMSCORE, has been derived to emulate strategic group formation. In this paper, we describe a simulation experiment to compare the ABMSCORE with actual human behavior. The comparison criterion is the respective rates of finding an ideal coalition. In our experimental design, we go to great lengths to ensure the similarity of the scenarios in the two trial types: trials with computerized agents only and trials involving human participants when one of the computerized agents is replaced by an actual human. We did this to limit the number of possible extraneous variables introduced into the experimental system. The scenario considered is the glove game, a standard cooperative game that has been previously used in human experiments. Our results indicate that the ABMSCORE model produces similar rates of finding the ideal coalition as the human players; however, there are some limitations. This research provides evidence for using the ABMSCORE modeling approach to model human strategic coalition formation in agent-based models.

Understanding Extreme Violent Behavior in Ultra Firms: Exploring Identity Fusion from a Dialogical Perspective

This paper explores a dialogical operationalization of identity fusion in the context of football firms. An in-depth life story interview with a longstanding member of a football firm involved in several violent episodes was qualitatively analyzed. The variety of positions of the self (I-positions) as well as the dialogical relations established by such positions were examined under themes associated with identity fusion, in an attempt to understand pro-group radical violent behavior. Results suggest that a core coalition of internal I-positions and external We-positions favoring extreme ultra violence appeared to dominate the participant’s self-system. This coalition seemed to have soft boundaries among the positions compounding it and, at the same time, rigid boundaries with other positions of the self-system, operating as an I-prison, preventing alternative counter-violence voices to be heard and promoter or meta-positions to emerge. Considering that functionally equivalent forms of identity fusion have been identified in radical football violence and terrorism, this knowledge can contribute to tackle the pathways for engaging in extreme violence in favor of a group/organization. Moreover, it can be used to develop more effective programs to promote individuals’ de-fusion from different groups, whenever group adherence proves dysfunctional and risky for themselves and/or others.

Non-Cooperative Team Formation and a Team Formation Mechanism

We model decentralized team formation as a game in which players make offers to potential teams whose members then either accept or reject the offers. The games induce no-delay subgame perfect equilibria with unique outcomes that are individually rational and match soulmates. We provide sufficient conditions for equilibria to implement core coalition structures, and show that when each player can make a sufficiently large number of proposals, outcomes are Pareto optimal. We then design a mechanism to implement equilibrium of this game and provide sufficient conditions to ensure that truthful reporting of preferences is a strong ex post Nash equilibrium. Moreover, we show empirically that players rarely have an incentive to misreport preferences more generally. Furthermore, for the problem with cardinal preferences, we show empirically that the resulting mechanism results in significantly higher social welfare than serial dictatorship, and the outcomes are highly equitable.

Ideological Factions in the Republican and Democratic Parties

Both the Republican and Democratic parties are internally divided. Each contains a party regular wing, which is interested in winning office and in the compromises necessary to govern. And each contains an ideological wing, which is interested in close adherence to the core coalition of the party. But the nature of the cleavage is very different within the parties. Among Democrats, the cleavage is mild, with most members belonging to the party regular camp, to the chagrin of ideologues, who are for the most part Bernie Sanders supporters. The cleavage among Republicans, though, is so deep that the party could not find a way to bridge it in the so-called invisible primary for 2016, creating an opening for Donald Trump, who is from neither camp.

The Social Construction of Policy Feedback: Incarceration, Conservatism, and Ideological Change

Over the last decade, in a major switch in position, conservatives have embraced the cause of reducing prison populations in the states and, increasingly, at the national level. The long-term crime decline and the increasing antistatism of the Republican Party contributed to this change, but it also has an important cognitive component: Policy makers have become more open to evidence of the damaging effects of mass incarceration. In contrast to previous studies, our case shows that such policy “feedback” only functions politically when a signal about a policy consequence is assigned valence and intensity by policy makers, whose calculations are heavily structured by the demands of party coalitions. On issues in which no core coalition member has a major stake, feedback can be tipped from reinforcing to undermining and vice versa, but this process depends on the efforts of entrepreneurs to change the way information is processed. In a highly polarized environment, opening policy makers to previously ignored evidence requires the cultivation of a reform cadre composed of ideological standard-bearers who can vouch for the orthodoxy of the new position.

Instituting a transnational accountability regime: The case of Sovereign Wealth Funds and “GAPP”

This paper analyses the development of a transnational accountability regime, – the Generally Accepted Principles and Practices (GAPP), introduced in 2008 for sovereign wealth funds. Facilitated by the International Monetary Fund, the regime aimed to improve the transparency, governance and accountability of these government-owned investment funds that originate primarily from the Middle East and Asia. I focus here on the struggles leading to the establishment of the boundaries of the GAPP accountability regime by diagnosing the accountability problem, determining the providers and the imagined users of the accounts and defining the appropriate course of action. I then analyse the struggles involved in negotiating the process and technologies used to establish the accountability relationship including the role of standards in accounting, audit and risk management, as well as transparency and compliance pressures. In each case I identify the different ideas or templates that emerged during the negotiations and how consensus was achieved through careful steering by a core coalition comprising the US Treasury and the largest, most legitimate funds. I highlight the need to go beyond typical fault lines in debates surrounding the origins of global governance regimes (e.g. local vs. global, western vs. non-western, core vs. peripheral) by focusing on emerging coalitions of local/global and western/non-western actors that increasingly drive such regimes. I show how the disproportionate representation of financial actors in such coalitions leads to less attention to questions of public accountability, and instead focusing such regimes on financial accountability. I further elaborate on the implications of the fall-back to transparency in transnational accountability regimes as a last resort and the types of resistance emerging against it.

"A Nation's Need—Good and Well Trained Mothers": Gender, Charity, and the New Urban South

"A Nation's Need—Good and Well Trained Mothers"Gender, Charity, and the New Urban South Thomas C. Henthorn (bio) In the first decades of the twentieth century Houston, Texas, underwent profound economic and social changes resulting from oil strikes on the Texas Gulf Coast and a subsequent population explosion. In response a unified coalition of reform-minded city builders, yearning for a more orderly community, implemented a host of bureaucratic solutions to ameliorate the dynamics of urbanization. The realization of this community, known universally among reformers as the New South, depended on the effective regulation of the economy, but also control of the social environment in which this new economy would operate.1 It was within this larger commitment to Southern progress that the modernization of social services and charity developed within Houston. Armed with an unequivocal commitment to New South ideology, a core coalition of reformers—elite boosters, club women, and educated urban clergy—embarked on an ambitious social uplift scheme to bring the city in line with national standards in health, education, and social services. To progressives in Houston social uplift encompassed a number of health and welfare policies included as part of city builders' vision to build Houston into a grand metropolis of the New South. An overriding consideration by reformers as they modernized and centralized social services was guarding family life against the ravages of the city. Within this context Southern progressives premised their policies on the belief that building a great city and redeeming Southern society depended on a patriarchal hierarchy of healthy children, dedicated mothers, and hardworking fathers. The discussions that emerged among the coalition of reformers flowed from a decidedly class-bound vision of families. Central to these discussions were representations of women and their contributions to civic life. These representations drew upon middle-class discourses that articulated a racialized version of femininity in which the ideal civic function for women was motherhood. The result was a set of welfare practices that defined working-class [End Page 71] men and women's public civic capacity by their private paternal and maternal roles. Such representations had real social and economic effects on the lives of working-class women and their families. These gendered concepts of the civic form allowed reformers to set the terms of the debate about the proper place of men and women in a rapidly changing urban society. Hence, as city builders erected the built environment, they wished to construct, simultaneously, good mothers and good fathers as means of mediating the unwieldy dynamics of urbanization. Constructing representations of motherhood as a way to influence the distribution of limited social welfare resources also constituted a particularly intense struggle around race. As residents of a Southern city, Houston's city builders saw maintaining racial hierarchies amid changing social and economic circumstances as fundamental to the New South's civic culture. Southern views on race emphasized the differences between black and white. But at the dawn of the twentieth century the lines between race and what Americans refer to as ethnicity were not clear. This fluidity in racial thinking was due to large numbers of foreign-born immigrants who had been streaming into American cities for the past several decades. And this fluidity complicated the overly simplistic view of race in Houston. Even though reformers characterized some of their efforts as "immigrant work," when it came to uplifting families, charity workers only seldom racialized their gendered representations of the family in a manner that distinguished foreign-born women from native-born whites. Rather, a shared racial identity between foreign-born and native-born white women crystallized poignantly the necessity, reformers believed, to impress upon all newcomers normative Anglo middle-class ideals—religious faith, good citizenship, an appreciation for hard work, and moral strictness.2 Charity workers, however, consistently reproduced racialized narratives about the fitness of Mexican, and especially black, families in social policies that addressed health and hygiene, child care, and settlement work. Progressive economic and social uplift policies in the New South were foremost predicated on the assumed inferiority of blacks. Jim Crow laws and the traditions of a segregated society meant that any social service provided to African Americans would be...

Noncooperative formation of coalitions in hedonic games

We study a bargaining procedure of coalition formation in the class of hedonic games, where players’ preferences depend solely on the coalition they belong to. We provide an example of nonexistence of a pure strategy stationary perfect equilibrium, and a necessary and sufficient condition for existence. We show that when the game is totally stable (the game and all its restrictions have a nonempty core), there always exists a no-delay equilibrium generating core outcomes. Other equilibria exhibiting delay or resulting in unstable outcomes can also exist. If the core of the hedonic game and its restrictions always consist of a single point, we show that the bargaining game admits a unique stationary perfect equilibrium, resulting in the immediate formation of the core coalition structure.

The Recursive Core for Non-Superadditive Games

We study the recursive core introduced in Huang and Sjöström [8]. In general partition function form games, the recursive core coalition structure may be either coarser or finer than the one that maximizes the social surplus. Moreover, the recursive core structure is typically different from the one predicted by the α-core. We fully implement the recursive core for general games, including non-superadditive games where the grand coalition does not form in equilibrium. We do not put any restrictions, such as stationarity, on strategies.

CAFTA Opposition

Overlapping transnational networks attempted to reconcile divergent perspectives— some favoring rejection, others reform—and leverage change in the U.S. government’s framing of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). The experience of the Stop CAFTA Coalition shows that protest movements cannot be fully understood from the perspective of a single period in time. Core coalition members began organizing decades prior to CAFTA’s proposal, generally on a topic other than free trade, and their solidarity-based decision-making model was fundamental to their decision to reject rather than attempt to reform CAFTA—since this was the position of their Central American partner organizations. A split between reforming CAFTA and more radically transforming free trade with the United States emerged as a fault line in CAFTA opposition, but solidarity groups maintained their anti-free-trade position even as they cooperated within networks representing distinct interests.

Leadership coalitions and change: the role of states in the European Union

The role of states in the European Union has not diminished over the history of the organization's institutional development. On the contrary: since the fall of the Berlin Wall, member-state influence over Union affairs actually seems to have grown. This is attributable both to the weakening of the supranational elements and to the expansion of intergovernmental activity in key policy areas. Added to this, the growth in the number of EU member states, and the diversity that now exists in an EU of 25, have reinforced the network of relationships, both bilateral and multilateral, between member states. Consequently, the EU has both centripetal and centrifugal forces at work, with member states drawn together in a continuing formal integration process and driven towards building tactical associations among themselves. This article discusses the relationship between the formal and the informal layers of integration in Europe, and points to the changing constellations and coalitions among the current member states. Special attention is given to the cleavages that emerged between the EU governments over the negotiations on treaty reform, from the Treaty of Maastricht to the Treaty on the European Constitution. With regard to the power structure within the EU, the article outlines the perspectives of a ‘Big Three’ core coalition as successor to the Franco-German motor.

Statecraft, Strategy, and Corporate Leadership

Statecraft—the use of persuasion and informal authority to mobilize coalitions to accomplish goals—is a little-recognized but critical element of strategic leadership. In exercising statecraft, top managers continually move back and forth across the boundary between the firm and a wide variety of constituencies, paying close attention to the political as well as the economic consequences of their decisions. The two central jobs of the corporate statesman are managing the core coalition assembled to achieve corporate purpose and maintaining the balance between the technocratic and political systems of the firm.