23,164 research outputs found
Matrix Representations and Extension of the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution
The graph model for conflict resolution (GMCR) provides a convenient
and effective means to model and analyze a strategic conflict.
Standard practice is to carry out a stability analysis of a graph
model, and then to follow up with a post-stability analysis, two
critical components of which are status quo analysis and coalition
analysis. In stability analysis, an equilibrium is a state that is
stable for all decision makers (DMs) under appropriate stability
definitions or solution concepts. Status quo analysis aims to
determine whether a particular equilibrium is reachable from a
status quo (or an initial state) and, if so, how to reach it. A
coalition is any subset of a set of DMs. The coalition stability
analysis within the graph model is focused on the status quo states
that are equilibria and assesses whether states that are stable from
individual viewpoints may be unstable for coalitions. Stability
analysis began within a simple preference structure which includes a
relative preference relationship and an indifference relation.
Subsequently, preference uncertainty and strength of preference were
introduced into GMCR but not formally integrated.
In this thesis, two new preference frameworks, hybrid preference and
multiple-level preference, and an integrated algebraic approach are
developed for GMCR. Hybrid preference extends existing preference
structures to combine preference uncertainty and strength of
preference into GMCR. A multiple-level preference framework expands
GMCR to handle a more general and flexible structure than any
existing system representing strength of preference. An integrated
algebraic approach reveals a link among traditional stability
analysis, status quo analysis, and coalition stability analysis by
using matrix representation of the graph model for conflict
resolution.
To integrate the three existing preference structures into a hybrid
system, a new preference framework is proposed for graph models
using a quadruple relation to express strong or mild preference of
one state or scenario over another, equal preference, and an
uncertain preference. In addition, a multiple-level preference
framework is introduced into the graph model methodology to handle
multiple-level preference information, which lies between relative
and cardinal preferences in information content. The existing
structure with strength of preference takes into account that if a
state is stable, it may be either strongly stable or weakly stable
in the context of three levels of strength. However, the three-level
structure is limited in its ability to depict the intensity of
relative preference. In this research, four basic solution concepts
consisting of Nash stability, general metarationality, symmetric
metarationality, and sequential stability, are defined at each level
of preference for the graph model with the extended multiple-level
preference. The development of the two new preference frameworks
expands the realm of applicability of the graph model and provides
new insights into strategic conflicts so that more practical and
complicated problems can be analyzed at greater depth.
Because a graph model of a conflict consists of several interrelated
graphs, it is natural to ask whether well-known results of Algebraic
Graph Theory can help analyze a graph model. Analysis of a graph
model involves searching paths in a graph but an important
restriction of a graph model is that no DM can move twice in
succession along any path. (If a DM can move consecutively, then
this DM's graph is effectively transitive. Prohibiting consecutive
moves thus allows for graph models with intransitive graphs, which
are sometimes useful in practice.) Therefore, a graph model must be
treated as an edge-weighted, colored multidigraph in which each arc
represents a legal unilateral move and distinct colors refer to
different DMs. The weight of an arc could represent some preference
attribute. Tracing the evolution of a conflict in status quo
analysis is converted to searching all colored paths from a status
quo to a particular outcome in an edge-weighted, colored
multidigraph. Generally, an adjacency matrix can determine a simple
digraph and all state-by-state paths between any two vertices.
However, if a graph model contains multiple arcs between the same
two states controlled by different DMs, the adjacency matrix would
be unable to track all aspects of conflict evolution from the status
quo. To bridge the gap, a conversion function using the matrix
representation is designed to transform the original problem of
searching edge-weighted, colored paths in a colored multidigraph to
a standard problem of finding paths in a simple digraph with no
color constraints. As well, several unexpected and useful links
among status quo analysis, stability analysis, and coalition
analysis are revealed using the conversion function.
The key input of stability analysis is the reachable list of a DM,
or a coalition, by a legal move (in one step) or by a legal sequence
of unilateral moves, from a status quo in 2-DM or -DM () models. A weighted reachability matrix for a DM or a coalition along
weighted colored paths is designed to construct the reachable list
using the aforementioned conversion function. The weight of each
edge in a graph model is defined according to the preference
structure, for example, simple preference, preference with
uncertainty, or preference with strength. Furthermore, a graph model
and the four basic graph model solution concepts are formulated
explicitly using the weighted reachability matrix for the three
preference structures. The explicit matrix representation for
conflict resolution (MRCR) that facilitates stability calculations
in both 2-DM and -DM () models for three existing preference structures. In addition,
the weighted reachability matrix by a coalition is used to produce
matrix representation of coalition stabilities in
multiple-decision-maker conflicts for the three preference
frameworks.
Previously, solution concepts in the graph model were traditionally
defined logically, in terms of the underlying graphs and preference
relations. When status quo analysis algorithms were developed, this
line of thinking was retained and pseudo-codes were developed
following a similar logical structure. However, as was noted in the
development of the decision support system (DSS) GMCR II, the nature
of logical representations makes coding difficult. The DSS GMCR II,
is available for basic stability analysis and status quo analysis
within simple preference, but is difficult to modify or adapt to
other preference structures. Compared with existing graphical or
logical representation, matrix representation for conflict
resolution (MRCR) is more effective and convenient for computer
implementation and for adapting to new analysis techniques.
Moreover, due to an inherent link between stability analysis and
post-stability analysis presented, the proposed algebraic approach
establishes an integrated paradigm of matrix representation for the
graph model for conflict resolution
Multiplex Communities and the Emergence of International Conflict
Advances in community detection reveal new insights into multiplex and
multilayer networks. Less work, however, investigates the relationship between
these communities and outcomes in social systems. We leverage these advances to
shed light on the relationship between the cooperative mesostructure of the
international system and the onset of interstate conflict. We detect
communities based upon weaker signals of affinity expressed in United Nations
votes and speeches, as well as stronger signals observed across multiple layers
of bilateral cooperation. Communities of diplomatic affinity display an
expected negative relationship with conflict onset. Ties in communities based
upon observed cooperation, however, display no effect under a standard model
specification and a positive relationship with conflict under an alternative
specification. These results align with some extant hypotheses but also point
to a paucity in our understanding of the relationship between community
structure and behavioral outcomes in networks.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1802.0039
The Second-Order Impact of Relative Power on Outcomes of Crisis Bargaining: A Theory of Expected Disutility and Resolve
How does structure shape behavior and outcomes in crisis bargaining? Formal bargaining models of war rely on expected utility theory to describe first-order effects, whereby the payoffs of war determine actors’ “resolve” to fight as a function of costs and benefits. Value preferences of risk and future discounting are routinely treated as predefined and subjective individual attributes, outside the strategic context of bargaining or independent from expected utility. However, such treatment fails to account for context-conditional preferences sourcing from actors’ expectations of relative gain or loss. Drawing on a wealth of experimental evidence from behavioral economics, but without departing from rational choice or compromising theoretical parsimony, this dissertation proposes a systematic differentiation of value preferences conditional on anticipated gain/loss, i.e., the endogenous shift in power bargaining is expected to produce. Whereas the utility of gain incentivizes a challenge to the status quo, the disutility of loss imposes reactive resolve via asymmetrical risk-acceptance and lower discounting of future payoffs. The proposed theory of reactive resolve, thus, reveals the second-order impact of structural conditions on behavior and outcomes in crisis bargaining. Short of this behavioral effect, bargaining models exhibit a tendency of automatic adjustment of benefits which fails to capture the very essence of conflict and encourages erroneous hypotheses about the role of superiority, such as the nuclear superiority hypothesis reviewed and rejected as part of this research.
The prescriptive and predictive inaccuracy of the standard rationalist approach is evident in the solution of the most fundamental bargaining problem - a credible commitment problem arising in the context of “bargaining over future bargaining power” (Fearon 1996). By formally integrating and simulating expected gain- and loss-induced preferences, this study demonstrates substantial deviations from previous results. Based on the findings, several theoretical and empirical implications are derived concerning the mechanism of crisis escalation, the relationship between the distribution of power and the likelihood of war, and the challenge to coercion. The prescribed mechanism is then empirically tested against cases of compellence and deterrence, including two of the most significant cases of nuclear crisis, using process tracing as a qualitative tool of causal inference
Applications of negotiation theory to water issues
The authors review the applications of noncooperative bargaining theory to waterrelated issues-which fall in the category of formal models of negotiation. They aim to identify the conditions under which agreements are likely to emerge and their characteristics, to support policymakers in devising the"rules of the game"that could help obtain a desired result. Despite the fact that allocation of natural resources, especially trans-boundary allocation, has all the characteristics of a negotiation problem, there are not many applications of formal negotiation theory to the issue. Therefore, the authors first discuss the noncooperative bargaining models applied to water allocation problems found in the literature. Key findings include the important role noncooperative negotiations can play in cases where binding agreements cannot be signed; the value added of politically and socially acceptable compromises; and the need for a negotiated model that considers incomplete information over the negotiated resource.Water Supply and Sanitation Governance and Institutions,Town Water Supply and Sanitation,Water and Industry,Environmental Economics&Policies,Water Conservation
Applications of negotiation theory to water issues
The purpose of the paper is to review the applications of non-cooperative bargaining theory to water related issues – which fall in the category of formal models of negotiation. The ultimate aim is that of, on the one hand, identify the conditions under which agreements are likely to emerge, and their characteristics; and, on the other hand, to support policy makers in devising the “rules of the game” that could help obtain a desired result. Despite the fact that allocation of natural resources, especially of trans-boundary nature, has all the characteristics of a negotiation problem, there are not many applications of formal negotiation theory to the issue. Therefore, this paper first discusses the noncooperative bargaining models applied to water allocation problems found in the literature. Particular attention will be given to those directly modelling the process of negotiation, although some attempts at finding strategies to maintain the efficient allocation solution will also be illustrated. In addition, this paper will focus on Negotiation Support Systems (NSS), developed to support the process of negotiation. This field of research is still relatively new, however, and NSS have not yet found much use in real life negotiation. The paper will conclude by highlighting the key remaining gaps in the literature.Negotiation theory, Bragaining, Coalitions, Fairness, Agreements
Cooperation in a Game of Chicken with Heterogeneous Agents: An Experimental Study
Using a two-stage Game of Chicken, Cabon-Dhersin and Ramani (2007) examine the impact of population heterogeneity on cooperative behaviour. For that purpose, they introduce two different types of agents, namely those who always cooperate and those who strategically cooperate. The aim of the present experimental study is to investigate the descriptive accuracy of the one-stage version of this model. Even though the level of cooperation appears to be much higher than predicted, our data bring strong support to the main predictions that the structure of the population as well as the structure of the payoffs affect cooperative behaviour
Applications of Negotiation Theory to Water Issues
The purpose of the paper is to review the applications of non-cooperative bargaining theory to water related issues – which fall in the category of formal models of negotiation. The ultimate aim is that to, on the one hand, identify the conditions under which agreements are likely to emerge, and their characteristics; and, on the other hand, to support policy makers in devising the “rules of the game” that could help obtain a desired result. Despite the fact that allocation of natural resources, especially of trans-boundary nature, has all the characteristics of a negotiation problem, there are not many applications of formal negotiation theory to the issue. Therefore, this paper first discusses the non-cooperative bargaining models applied to water allocation problems found in the literature. Particular attention will be given to those directly modelling the process of negotiation, although some attempts at finding strategies to maintain the efficient allocation solution will also be illustrated. In addition, this paper will focus on Negotiation Support Systems (NSS), developed to support the process of negotiation. This field of research is still relatively new, however, and NSS have not yet found much use in real life negotiation. The paper will conclude by highlighting the key remaining gaps in the literature.Negotiation theory, Water, Agreeements, Stochasticity, Stakeholders
Exploiting a Goal-Decomposition Technique to Prioritize Non-functional Requirements
Business stakeholders need to have clear and realistic goals if they want to meet commitments in application development. As a consequence, at early stages they prioritize requirements. However, requirements do change. The effect of change forces the stakeholders to balance alternatives and reprioritize requirements accordingly. In this paper we discuss the problem of priorities to non-functional requirements subjected to change. We, then, propose an approach to help smooth the impact of such changes. Our approach favors the translation of nonoperational specifications into operational definitions that can be evaluated once the system is developed. It uses the goal-question-metric method as the major support to decompose non-operational specifications into operational ones. We claim that the effort invested in operationalizing NFRs helps dealing with changing requirements during system development. Based on\ud
this transformation and in our experience, we provide guidelines to prioritize volatile non-functional requirements
Integrated Decision Support System for Infrastructure Privatization under Uncertainty using Conflict Resolution
Infrastructure privatization decisions have an enormous financial and social impact on all stakeholders, including the public sector, the private sector, and the general public. Appropriate privatization decisions, however, are difficult to make due to the conflicting nature of the objectives of the various stakeholders. This research introduces a multi-criteria decision-making framework for evaluating and comparing a wide range of privatization schemes for infrastructure facilities. The framework is designed to resolve conflicts that arise because of the varying points of view of the stakeholders, and accordingly, determine the most appropriate decision that satisfies all stakeholders’ preferences. The developed framework is expected to help in re-engineering the traditional conflict resolution process, particularly for construction conflict resolution and infrastructure privatization decisions. The framework provides decision support at the management level through three successive decision support processes related to 1. Screening of feasible solutions using the Elimination Method of multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA); 2. Analyzing the actions and counteractions of decision makers using conflict resolution and decision stability concepts to determine the most stable resolution; and 3. Considering the uncertainty in decision maker’s preferences using Info-gap Theory to evaluate the robustness of varying uncertainty levels of the decisions. Based on the research, a procedure and a decision support system (DSS) have been developed and tested on real-life case studies of a wastewater treatment plant and a construction conflict. The results of the two case studies show that the proposed DSS can be used to support decisions effectively with respect to both construction conflicts and infrastructure privatization. The developed system is simple to apply and can therefore save time and avoid the costs associated with unsatisfactory decisions. This research is expected to contribute significantly to the understanding and selecting of proper Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) programs for infrastructure assets
Combining Spot and Futures Markets: A Hybrid Market Approach to Dynamic Spectrum Access
Dynamic spectrum access is a new paradigm of secondary spectrum utilization
and sharing. It allows unlicensed secondary users (SUs) to exploit
opportunistically the under-utilized licensed spectrum. Market mechanism is a
widely-used promising means to regulate the consuming behaviours of users and,
hence, achieves the efficient allocation and consumption of limited resources.
In this paper, we propose and study a hybrid secondary spectrum market
consisting of both the futures market and the spot market, in which SUs
(buyers) purchase under-utilized licensed spectrum from a spectrum regulator,
either through predefined contracts via the futures market, or through spot
transactions via the spot market. We focus on the optimal spectrum allocation
among SUs in an exogenous hybrid market that maximizes the secondary spectrum
utilization efficiency. The problem is challenging due to the stochasticity and
asymmetry of network information. To solve this problem, we first derive an
off-line optimal allocation policy that maximizes the ex-ante expected spectrum
utilization efficiency based on the stochastic distribution of network
information. We then propose an on-line VickreyCClarkeCGroves (VCG) auction
that determines the real-time allocation and pricing of every spectrum based on
the realized network information and the pre-derived off-line policy. We
further show that with the spatial frequency reuse, the proposed VCG auction is
NP-hard; hence, it is not suitable for on-line implementation, especially in a
large-scale market. To this end, we propose a heuristics approach based on an
on-line VCG-like mechanism with polynomial-time complexity, and further
characterize the corresponding performance loss bound analytically. We finally
provide extensive numerical results to evaluate the performance of the proposed
solutions.Comment: This manuscript is the complete technical report for the journal
version published in INFORMS Operations Researc
- …