Mahatma Gandhi and the Prisoner’s Dilemma: Strategic Civil Disobedience and Great Britain’s Great Loss of Empire in India

This paper examines the relationship between statutory monopoly and collective action as a multi-person assurance game culminating in an end to British Empire in India. In a simple theoretical model, it is demonstrated whether or not a collective good enjoys (or is perceived to enjoy) pure jointness of production and why the evolutionary stable strategy of non-violence was supposed to work on the principle that the coordinated reaction of a ethnically differentiated religious crowd to a conflict between two parties (of colonizer and colonized) over confiscatory salt taxation would significantly affect its course. Following Mancur Olson (1965) and Dennis Chong (1991), a model of strategic civil disobedience is created which is used to demonstrate how collective action can be used to produce an all-or-nothing public good to achieve economic and political independence

STRATEGIC DIFFERENTIATION AND STRATEGIC EMULATION IN GAMES WITH UNCERTAINTY

When players who choose a common strategy face a common shock, while players who choose different strategies face independent or imperfectly correlated shocks, equilibrium choices exhibit differentiation (respectively emulation) when the sign of the cross-partial derivative of the firms' profit functions with respect to the realizations of the uncertain variables is negative (respectively positive). I consider a variety of applications, including technology choice, brand investments, and R&D races, many of which can be characterized as two-stage games. In such games I demonstrate that differentiation is more likely to occur when the second stage game is a game of strategic substitutes. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005.