Two-level Game Research Articles

Political Economy of Cross-Strait Relations: is Beijing’s patronage policy on Taiwanese business sustainable?

Via quantitative analysis and interviews, this article examines the credibility and sustainability of Beijing’s patronage policy towards Taiwanese business. The new finding is that the rise of economic nationalism and local protectionism in China is undermining and constraining Beijing’s patronage policy. Consequently, China’s rising economy does not deepen cross-Strait integration but rather crowds out Taiwanese business. Moreover, considering the growing influence of Chinese domestic constraints, this article attempts to provide a bilateral two-level game to grasp the new dynamics on cross-Strait relations under the new normal.

Tolerance design with multiple resource suppliers on cloud-manufacturing platform

Tolerance design is a key technology in cloud manufacturing mode to develop the quality and reduce cost. Different from most existing studies that focus on scenarios with the single welfare of products, this paper studies the tolerance design with multiple resource suppliers on cloud manufacturing, in which a two-level game is put forward to reveal the relationship between the products and resource suppliers. The product is modeled as a population in an evolutionary game, while the competition of the suppliers is modeled as a non-cooperative game. Then, equilibriums of both evolutionary game and non-cooperative game are proved existing to solve the multi-objective optimization of tolerance design on cloud manufacturing. A numerical case study is used to illustrate the proposed model and algorithms. The performance and advantage of the proposed method are discussed in the end.

Dynamic C-RAN resource sharing scheme based on a hierarchical game approach

Over the past decade, wireless applications have experienced tremendous growth, and this growth is likely to multiply in the near future. To cope with expected drastic data traffic growth, a new cloud computing-based radio access network (C-RAN) has been proposed for next-generation cellular networks. It is considered as a cost-efficient way of meeting high resource demand of future wireless access networks. In this paper, we propose a novel resource sharing scheme for future C-RAN systems. Based on the Indian buffet game, we formulate the C-RAN resource allocation problem as a two-level game model and find an effective solution according to the coopetition approach. Our proposed scheme constantly monitors the current C-RAN system conditions and adaptively responds in a distributed manner. The experimental results validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed scheme under dynamic C-RAN situations.

The Emergence of Climate Change Mitigation Action by Society: An Agent-Based Scenario Discovery Study

Developing model-based narratives of society’s response to climate change is challenged by two factors. First, society’s response to possible future climate change is subject to many uncertainties. Second, we argue that society’s mitigation action emerge out of the actions and interactions of the many actors in society. Together, these two factors imply that the overarching dynamics of society’s response to climate change are unpredictable. In contrast to conventional processes of developing scenarios, in this study the emergence of climate change mitigation action by society has been represented in an agent-based model with which we developed two narratives of the emergence of climate change mitigation action by applying exploratory modelling and analysis. The agent-based model represents a two-level game involving governments and citizens changing their emission behaviour in the face of climate change through mitigation action. Insights gained from the exploration on uncertainties pertaining to the system have been used to construct two internally consistent and plausible narratives on the pathways of the emergence of mitigation action, which, as we argue, are a reasonable summary of the uncertainty space. The first narrative highlights how and when strong mitigation action emerges while the second narrative highlights how and when weak mitigation action emerges. In contrast to a conventional scenario development process, these two scenarios have been discovered bottom up rather than being defined top down. They succinctly capture the possible outcomes of the emergence of climate change mitigation by society across a large range of uncertain factors. The narratives therefore help in conveying the consequences of the various uncertainties influencing the emergence of climate change mitigation action by society.

Domestic Politics and US-China Trade Disputes over Renewable Energy

In this article I draw on the two-level game approach to analyze the influence of domestic politics on US-China trade disputes in alternative energy, especially in solar energy. I suggest that the difficulty Washington faces in getting China to address market access barriers in alternative energy needs to be viewed in light of both the coalitional dynamics in the United States resulting from the specific bilateral trade and investment relationship in this sector and Beijing's willingness to use industrial policy to foster economic competitiveness in nascent industries. Specifically, as China occupies the middle of the supply chain in the solar industry, both downstream users of low-cost Chinese imports and exporters of upstream products to China have voiced strong concerns about US trade action. Such domestic opposition, coupled with the importance of industrial policy for defending the country's long-term interests in a “strategic emerging” sector such as alternative energy, substantially constrains Washington's ability to influence Chinese policies.

A different two-level game: foreign policy officials' personal networks and coordinated policy innovation

ABSTRACTA well-known approach to modeling international relations treats them as a two-level game played by national governments and international organizations, in which they negotiate with one another while coping with internal constraints on their action posed by domestic politics or organizational governance. Officials in these organizations can play a different two-level game, arising from their simultaneous negotiations within their personal transnational networks and their official duties in their host organizations. In each domain, they can act in ways that improves their outcomes in the other one – informal understandings facilitate subsequent formal agreement, while actions taken within their organizations implement and cement what had been negotiated informally. Multi-organizational innovation can thus be coordinated even in the absence of formal action to do so. This process is illustrated through an examination of the role of an informal transnational network in the shifting of the policies of the government of India and major aid donors in the 1960s.

Closed-Form Pricing in Multiuser Access Networks With Incomplete Information

Pricing has been widely used to solve network optimization problems. In this paper, we study the case where the network service provider (NSP) has incomplete information about the users, such as the specific user type. Formulating the pricing of the monopolistic NSP and the flow control of the users as a two-level hierarchical game, we first obtain closed-form equilibrium solutions that jointly maximize the benefits of the monopolistic NSP and the users with heterogeneous quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. Then, based on the closed-form solutions, we consider a more general and practical multi-NSP and multiuser model. We further propose a novel one-sided job-hopping matching game to obtain stable NSP-user matching that can optimize network performance in a multi-NSP and multiuser scenario. Simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed game-theoretic approaches in both the monopolistic and multi-NSP cases.

The domestic politics of financial regulation: Informal ratification games and the EU capital requirement negotiations

ABSTRACTThis paper contributes to our understanding of post-crisis financial regulation by reasserting the centrality of domestic politics in defining government preferences and explaining regulatory outcomes. It draws on Robert Putnam's two-level game approach and Foreign Policy Analysis to develop a model of a three-level informal ratification game. This adds value to existing approaches by capturing the contested nature of government preferences and delineating the causal mechanisms through which domestic groups shape international negotiations. The model is used to explain the UK's pivotal role in the reform of bank capital requirements in the European Union (EU). It demonstrates that governments are able to take advantage of a narrowing domestic ‘win-set’ by marginalising the influence of industry and building political momentum for regulatory reform. In particular, the paper shows how UK negotiators were able to exploit the increased domestic costs of agreement and synergistic strategies between negotiations to successfully oppose the maximum harmonisation of capital rules across the EU.

Neoclassical Realism: Challengers and Bridging Identities

This article anchors neoclassical realism (NCR) as a solid theoretical framework which departs from Wendtian constructivism, Moravcsik's liberal theory, and Putnam's two-level game liberalism. NCR moves away from these other approaches by bridging three divides: the spatial (domestic–international), the cognitive (matter-ideas), and the temporal (present–future). What matters is not what states have to do because the structure compels them so (as Waltz and Wendt would want us to believe). Looking at what domestic interest groups want states to do (as Moravcsik and Putnam suggest) is also unsatisfactory. Rather, what can states do to represent domestic economic interests within the predefined geopolitical context? The argument here is that a version of geopolitical structure is external to the state and binds. However, a perceptual layer at the level of state policymaker affects the operationalization of that structure. Domestic economic forces make themselves felt through state-level policymakers, but only within the predefined context of binding structural factors that constrain. The findings from this study are vastly different from previous studies, suggesting that NCR's triple bridging identity distinguishes it from other IR theories.

The Advocacy of Democratic Governance by India and China: Patterns of Consistency/Inconsistency between Declaratory and Operational Practices

This article examines the patterns of consistency and inconsistency between how India and China advocate democratisation at the global and national levels. Addressing this question through a dualistic framework, we develop a detailed map of the rhetorical promotion of democratic governance by India and China through an analysis of 10 years of foreign affairs speeches, remarks, interviews and statements of political elites of both countries. The article argues that although China has not shied away from declarations on democracy domestically as well as on global governance, the contradictions between the clear and consistent push for democracy and equity at the global level and the highly contingent commitment to democracy at the national level remain highly salient. India’s deficiencies, by way of contrast, come not in the domain of legitimacy but effectiveness. India’s struggle to translate its domestic democratic credibility into more equitable representation at the global institutional level and into a stellar economic model at the domestic level exposes it to criticism in relationship to China. Yet, even with these gaps, the article concludes that India has some comparative advantages over China precisely because it can play a consistent two-level game in terms of the promotion of democracy both at global and state levels.

Power Allocation in Cooperative Communication System Based on Stackelberg Game

Cooperative communication has great potential to improve the wireless channel capacity by exploiting the antennas on wireless devices for spatial diversity. The performance in cooperative communication depends on careful resource allocation such as relay selection and power control. In this paper, the network is expanded and more than one source is used. What is proposed is a distributed buyer/seller game theoretic framework over multiuser cooperative communication networks in order to stimulate cooperation and improve the system performance. A two-level Stackelberg game is employed to jointly consider the benefits of the source node and the relay nodes in which the source node is modeled as a buyer and the relay nodes are modeled as sellers, respectively. In this work we proposed coded method in which relays amplify and code Source data and send it to destination at the same time and then signal detection occur in destination, but in the codeless network relays send source data separately to destination. So, here coded and codeless networks are compared and contrasted. The stimulation results revealed that the proposed coded method performed better than the codeless ones; furthermore, the research shows that relays near the sources can play a significant role in increasing source node's utility, so every source would like to buy more power from these preferred relays. Also, the proposed algorithm enforces truthful power demands.

The hidden side of the Ultimatum Game: The role of motivations and mind-reading in a two-level one-shot Ultimatum Game

The main aim of our study is to investigate the role of motivations and mind-reading in a two-level one-shot Ultimatum Game with three players. Our intention is to analyse subjects’ behaviour in both the responder and proposer roles. In the responder role, we found that the difference between the subjects’ expectations and the actual offers was the major factor that influenced their decisions and motivations in receiving money. In the proposer role, our results showed a significant influence of mind-reading, with a positive association between the fairness of subjects’ offers and the subjects’ expectations about the recipients’ willingness to accept. Although a shared concept of fairness exists findings suggest that decisions and motivations seem to depend on expectations, either when they are directly experienced or when they are ascribed to the counterpart.

Beyond rules and resources: Parliamentary scrutiny of EU policy proposals

This article examines the factors that shape parties' motivation to invest time and other resources in scrutinizing European Union policy proposals. We distinguish between two different motivations to engage in scrutiny activities. First, parties use such mechanisms to influence the national position directly. Second, parties play a two-level game and use scrutiny to manipulate their negotiator's domestic constraints. Both arguments depend on a set of conditions, namely the government's relative strength in Brussels, the transparency of the European Union decision-making process as well as the government's relative strength and cohesion in the domestic arena. On the empirical side, we study scrutiny at the level of committees in the national parliaments of Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, and the United Kingdom over a 13-year period, during which 32 governments are covered. Our findings suggest that parties deploy scrutiny to shift the domestic constraint strategically, but only if such a shift can be communicated convincingly to the international bargaining partners. Moreover, our findings suggest that opposition parties employ such measures to influence the position of a weak government.

Market Power Rents and Climate Change Mitigation: A Rationale for Coal Taxes?

In this paper we investigate the introduction of an export tax on steam coal levied by an individual country (Australia), or a group of major exporting countries. The policy motivation would be twofold: generating tax revenues against the background of improved terms-of-trade, while CO2 emissions are reduced. We construct and numerically apply a two-level game consisting of an optimal policy problem at the upper level, and an equilibrium model of the international steam coal market (based on COALMOD-World) at the lower level. We find that a unilaterally introduced Australian export tax on steam coal has little impact on global emissions and may be welfare reducing. On the contrary, a tax jointly levied by a climate coalition of major coal exporters may well leave these better off while significantly reducing global CO2 emissions from steam coal by up to 200 Mt CO2 per year. Comparable production-based tax scenarios consistently yield higher tax revenues but may be hard to implement against the opposition of disproportionally affected local stakeholders depending on low domestic coal prices.

Debunking American exceptionalism and rescuing liberalism

Culling the Masses seeks to explain the shift in American immigration policy from one based on racial and ethnic selection to a more equitable and colorblind approach. The authors argue that international and foreign policy considerations led to a radical shift in policy after World War II. They succeed in debunking American exceptionalism, but in this critique I argue that more attention should be given to the interaction of international and domestic politics, using a ‘two-level game’ framework. Moreover it is important to highlight the contradictions that are inherent in liberalism as a governing philosophy.

American hýbris: US Democracy Promotion in Cuba after the Cold War — Part 2

This second part of the article deals with the importance of democracy promotion towards Cuba as an internal political issue in the US, the so-called ‘two-level game’. In the last decade, democracy promotion has been receiving criticisms from the academic community and policymakers. The backlash on democracy promotion, the unintended consequences of democratic assistance in developing countries and the difficulty of predicting outcomes of democracy promotion in ‘transitional countries’ posed several questions to US foreign democratic assistance. While at a theoretical level, these problems have helped to redefine US democratic efforts abroad, the Cuban case has been highly dominated by democracy promotion as the cornerstone of US Cuba policy. Apart from Obama's new course with Cuba, which has not dramatically changed US goals on the island, US vision and strategy for the Cuban democratic transition have survived: despite everything, the US has continued to promote democracy in Cuba, with little or no change. In fact, despite Obama not abandoning democratisation, it seems he is pursuing a more ‘teleological approach’ to the matter.

Assessing EU Aid to the ‘Southern Partners’ of the European Neighbourhood Policy: Who Benefits from the Reforms in the Agricultural and Industrial Sector?

This article critically assesses the claims of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) to support the economic development of ‘southern rim’ states. By amending Putnam's two-level game analysis, the paper exposes the interactions between domestic, national and supranational actors and demonstrates the outcomes of the ENP reforms in the agricultural and industrial sectors. Particular attention is given to the contribution of the ENP to the development of a dual agricultural market in these countries and to the effects of standardization for North African businesses. The article concludes by arguing that in both case studies, and despite the changes brought by the ‘Arab Spring’, (recalibrated) elites still retain established vertical ties with domestic businesses (especially small and medium-sized enterprises)—a situation that benefits certain EU industrial and agricultural companies as well.

Popular Nationalism Dalam Kebijakan Luar Negeri Tiongkok Terhadap Jepang Pada Sengketa Kepulauan Senkaku/Diaoyu

This paper discusses about Popular Nationalism within China’s Foreign Policy towards Japan in the Context of Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands Dispute. Taking Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands’ dispute as the case, it can be conceived that, from two-level game perspective, Chinese government ‘instrumentalizes’ popular nationalism for its foreign policy purposes, i.e. strengthening its international position on the dispute and giving pressure to Japanese government. Practically, while putting pressure to Japan, popular nationalist movement also puts pressure on Chinese government by criticizing the government over its weak foreign policy towards Japan, as well as demanding for Chinese democratization and political change. Chinese government responds this situation by ‘managing’ popular nationalism. The government applies two-sided policy. When popular nationalist movement is favorable for Chinese foreign policy, the government gives popular nationalist a large controlled access to express their anger towards Japan. However, if popular nationalist starts to criticize government, demand for democratization and political change, Chinese government then restricts the movement by using institutional, informational, and ideational resourcesas well as starting to ban any protest and demonstration. This strange policy performed by Chinese government is strategically able to gain domestic support for its foreign policy, and maintain domestic status quo simultaneously.

Political legitimacy and European monetary union: contracts, constitutionalism and the normative logic of two-level games

ABSTRACTThe crisis of the euro area has severely tested the political authority of the European Union (EU). The crisis raises questions of normative legitimacy both because the EU is a normative order and because the construction of economic and monetary union (EMU) rested upon a theory that stressed the normative value of the depoliticization of money. However, this theory neglected the normative logic of the two-level game implicit in EMU. It also neglected the need for an impartial and publically acceptable constitutional order to acknowledge reasonable disagreements. By contrast, we contend that any reconstruction of the EU's economic constitution has to pay attention to reconciling a European monetary order with the legitimacy of member state governance. The EU requires a two-level contract to meet this standard. Member states must treat each other as equals and be representative of and accountable to their citizens on an equitable basis. These criteria entail that the EU's political legitimacy requires a form of demoicracy that we call ‘republican intergovernmentalism’. Only rules that could be acceptable as the product of a political constitution among the peoples of Europe can ultimately meet the required standards of political legitimacy. Such a political constitution could be brought about through empowering national parliaments in EU decision-making.

Study on Resource Configuration on Cloud Manufacturing

The purpose of manufacturing is to realize the requirement of customer. In manufacturing process of cloud system, there exist a lot of resource services which have similar functional characteristics to realize the requirement. It makes the manufacturing process more diverse. To develop the quality and reduce cost, a resource configuration model on cloud-manufacturing platform is put forward in this paper. According to the generalized six-point location principle, a growth design from the requirement of customers to entities with geometric constraints is proposed. By the requirement growing up to product, a configuration process is used to match the entities with the instances which the resources in the database could supply. Different from most existing studies, this paper studies the tolerance design with multiple candidate resource suppliers on cloud manufacturing to make the market play a two-level game considering the benefit of customers and the profit of resources to give an optimal result. A numerical case study is used to illustrate the proposed model and configuration process. The performance and advantage of the proposed method are discussed at the end.