Group Decision and Negotiation

Global environmental problems pose important diplomatic and legal challenges to the international community. The nature of these problems requires an unprecedented degree of international cooperation that is achieved through multilateral negotiation, which is often shaped by scientific uncertainty, the complexity of the issues, and the wide range of actors and interests. One way of analyzing and explaining this complicated process is through the use of comparative analysis. By breaking down the negotiating process into a series of phases and turning points, it becomes easier to analyze the roles of different actors, the management of issues, the formation of groups and coalitions, and the art of consensus building. This article uses comparative analysis to characterize, develop, and specify a model of the multilateral environmental negotiation process. The model is elaborated upon inductively through a comparative analysis of eleven cases of multilateral environmental negotiations. Statistical techniques are used to determine whether there is any relationship among attributes of the process (within the phases or at the turning points) and between these characteristics and outcomes.

Bài báo này đề xuất một đánh giá về quy tắc đa số dựa trên mức độ có thể bị thao túng bởi các cá nhân. Chúng tôi phân tích việc bỏ phiếu chiến lược không chỉ với tham chiếu đến khái niệm cân bằng Nash thông thường mà còn đến một số điểm yếu của khái niệm này, tùy thuộc vào các giả định về cách mà các tác nhân cá nhân lựa chọn chiến lược của họ. Chúng tôi cung cấp hai loại kết quả cho mỗi khái niệm cân bằng: Thứ nhất, chúng tôi đưa ra các điều kiện cần và đủ để một hồ sơ trở thành cân bằng khi quy tắc đa số được sử dụng; và thứ hai, chúng tôi trình bày các công thức cho tần suất chính xác của các tình huống không ổn định trong trường hợp ba lựa chọn.

In view of the changing nature of organisations, their structures and processes, managing organisational change is seen to be an ongoing challenge. In this paper, organisational learning is considered to be a potent force that drives organisational change. The use of an electronic group communication system supporting a distributed work process is explored in a network form of organisation. Following an analysis of the patterns of behaviour that occur within an evolving electronic social space, this paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for managing change through learning in a network form of organisation.

Nghiên cứu về việc đàm phán đang thu hút sự chú ý ngày càng nhiều vào mối quan hệ giữa các bên tham gia đàm phán. Nghiên cứu này mô tả sự phát triển của một chỉ số đa chiều để đo lường sức mạnh của các khía cạnh khác nhau của mối quan hệ. Kết quả từ một nghiên cứu trong phòng thí nghiệm sử dụng công cụ này cho thấy rằng các mối quan hệ gắn kết khuyến khích việc chia sẻ thông tin và không khuyến khích việc sử dụng các chiến thuật cưỡng chế, cả hai đều có ảnh hưởng trực tiếp hoặc gián tiếp đến việc đạt được các kết quả tích cực, cảm xúc tiêu cực và mối quan hệ đang diễn ra của các nhà đàm phán.

As a result of the climate change the situation in Arctic area leads to several important consequences. On the one hand, fossil fuels can be exploited much easier than before. On the other hand, their excavation leads to serious potential threats to fishing by changing natural habitats which in turn creates serious damage to the countries’ economies. Another set of problems arises due to the extension of navigable season for shipping routes. Thus, there are already discussions on how should resources be allocated among countries. In Aleskerov and Victorova (An analysis of potential conflict zones in the Arctic Region, HSE Publishing House, Moscow, 2015) a model was presented analyzing preferences of the countries interested in natural resources and revealing potential conflicts among them. We present several areas allocation models based on different preferences over resources among interested countries. As a result, we constructed several allocations where areas are assigned to countries with respect to the distance or the total interest, or according to the procedure which is counterpart of the Adjusted Winner procedure. We consider this work as an attempt to help decision-making authorities in their complex work on adjusting preferences and conducting negotiations in the Arctic zone. We would like to emphasize that these models can be easily extended to larger number of parameters, to the case when some areas for some reasons should be excluded from consideration, to the case with ‘weighted’ preferences with respect to some parameters. And we strongly believe that such models and evaluations based on them can be helpful for the process of corresponding decision making.

This paper provides an extended analysis of an equilibrium concept for non-cooperative games with boundedly rational players: Nash-2 equilibrium. Players think one step ahead and account for all profitable responses of player-specific subsets of opponents because of both the cognitive limitations on predicting everyone’s reaction and the inability to make deeper and certain predictions. They cautiously reject improvements that might lead to worse profits after some reasonable response. For n-person games we introduce the notion of a reflection network consisting of direct competitors to express the idea of selective farsightedness. For almost every 2-person game with a complete reflection network, we prove the existence of a Nash-2 equilibrium. Nash-2 equilibrium sets are obtained in models of price and quantity competition, and in Tullock’s rent-seeking model with two players. It is shown that such farsighted behavior may provide strategic support for tacit collusion. The analyses of n-person Prisoner’s dilemma and oligopoly models with a star reflection structure demonstrate some possibilities of strategic collusion and a large variety of potentially stable outcomes.