Models Of Conflict And Cooperation

Deals with the topic of game theory. This textbook discusses the general game models including deterministic, strategic, sequential, bargaining, coalition, and fair division games. It emphasises on the process of mathematical modeling.

Conflict is a major facet of many environmental challenges of our time. However, growing conflict complexity makes it more difficult to identify win-win strategies for sustainable conflict resolution. Innovative methods are needed to help predict, understand, and resolve conflicts in cooperative ways. Agent-Based Modeling of Environmental Conflict and Cooperation examines computer modeling techniques as an important set of tools for assessing environmental and resource-based conflicts and, ultimately, for finding pathways to conflict resolution and cooperation. This book has two major goals. First, it argues that complexity science can be a unifying framework for professions engaged in conflict studies and resolution, including anthropology, law, management, peace studies, urban planning, and geography. Second, this book presents an innovative framework for approaching conflicts as complex adaptive systems by using many forms of environmental analysis, including system dynamics modeling, agent-based modeling, evolutionary game theory, viability theory, and network analysis. Known as VIABLE (Values and Investments from Agent-Based interaction and Learning in Environmental systems), this framework allows users to model advanced facets of conflicts—including institution building, coalition formation, adaptive learning, and the potential for future conflict—and conflict resolution based on the long-term viability of the actors’ strategies. Written for scholars, students, practitioners, and policy makers alike, this book offers readers an extensive introduction to environmental conflict research and resolution techniques. As the result of decades of research, the text presents a strong argument for conflict modeling and reviews the most popular and advanced techniques, including system dynamics modeling, agent-based modeling, and participatory modeling methods. This indispensable guide uses NetLogo, a widely used and free modeling software package, to implement the VIABLE modeling approach in three case study applications around the world. Readers are invited to explore, adapt, modify, and expand these models to conflicts they hope to better understand and resolve.

This cutting-edge book presents the theory and practice of the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution (GMCR), which is used for strategically investigating disputes in any field to enable informed decision making. It clearly explains how GMCR can determine what is the best a particular decision maker (DM) can independently achieve in dynamic interaction with others. Moves and counter-moves follow various stability definitions reflecting human behavior under conflict. The book defines a wide range of preference structures to represent a DM’s comparisons of states or scenarios: equally preferred, more or less preferred; unknown; degrees of strength of preference; and hybrid. It vividly describes how GMCR can ascertain whether a DM can fare even better by cooperating with others in a coalition. The book portrays how a conflict can evolve from the status quo to a desirable resolution, and provides a universal design for a decision support system to implement the innovative decision technologies using the matrix formulation of GMCR. Further, it illustrates the key ideas using real-world conflicts and supplies problems at the end of each chapter. As such, this highly instructive book benefits teachers, mentors, students and practitioners in any area where conflict arises.

In order to use the perspective of emotions to explain conflict escalation and crises, a comparison to conceptions such as the pursuit of power or financial interests is warranted. These theoretical considerations are investigated within cases of civil wars and shown to be effective in explaining the origins but also the breakdown of conflicts.

A comprehensive procedure for systematically examining actual disputes. Clearly explains the theory and practice of this novel approach to conflict modeling, analysis and resolution. Based upon ideas from both graph and game theories, it extends the realm of multiple objective-multiple-participant decision making in useful directions. Includes a wealth of illustrations and a computer disk.

Make workplace conflict resolution a game that EVERYBODY wins! Recent studies show that typical managers devote more than a quarter of their time to resolving coworker disputes. The Big Book of Conflict-Resolution Games offers a wealth of activities and exercises for groups of any size that let you manage your business (instead of managing personalities). Part of the acclaimed, bestselling Big Books series, this guide offers step-by-step directions and customizable tools that empower you to heal rifts arising from ineffective communication, cultural/personality clashes, and other specific problem areas—before they affect your organization's bottom line. Let The Big Book of Conflict-Resolution Games help you to: Build trust Foster morale Improve processes Overcome diversity issues And more Dozens of physical and verbal activities help create a safe environment for teams to explore several common forms of conflict—and their resolution. Inexpensive, easy-to-implement, and proved effective at Fortune 500 corporations and mom-and-pop businesses alike, the exercises in The Big Book of Conflict-Resolution Games delivers everything you need to make your workplace more efficient, effective, and engaged.

This book provides an institutional costs framework for intelligence and security communities to examine the factors that can encourage or obstruct cooperation. The governmental functions of security and intelligence require various organisations to interact in a symbiotic way. These organisations must constantly negotiate with each other to establish who should address which issue and with what resources. By coupling adapted versions of transaction costs theories with socio-political perspectives, this book provides a model to explain why some cooperative endeavours are successful, whilst others fail. This framework is applied to counterterrorism and defence intelligence in the UK and the US to demonstrate that the view of good cooperation in the former and poor cooperation in the latter is overly simplistic. Neither is necessarily more disposed to behave cooperatively than the other; rather, the institutional costs created by their respective organisational architectures incentivise different cooperative behaviour in different circumstances. This book will be of much interest to students of intelligence studies, organisational studies, politics and security studies.

Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) systems will undoubtedly play an important role in the application of information systems in the 1990s and beyond. The term "cooperative" is often taken for granted and it is assumed that CSCW users are willing and able to cooperate without any difficulty. This assumption ignores the possibility of conflict and, as a result, the expression, management and resolution of conflict are not supported. CSCW: Cooperation or Conflict? arose from a one-day meeting on computer supported cooperative work which examined the role of conflict in collaborative work. The aim of the meeting was to examine what people actually do when they say they are cooperating, and to assess how this affects the design of systems. The chapters of this book are fuller accounts of the work presented during the meeting. The first chapter presents a survey of studies of conflict in social psychology and related fields, providing both a summary of the main findings and a set of pointers into the literature. The subsequent chapters each present a different view of conflict, focussing particularly on the social and organizational settings, and the factors which lead to conflict. The earlier chapters provide conceptual frameworks for the study of various types of conflict, while the later chapters concentrate on the implications for CSCW. The book is the first to examine conflict from a CSCW perspective. It offers a unique snapshot of current research work in this exciting field, and establishes the importance of the issue. For the designer of CSCW systems, it offers insights into the role of conflict, and an analysis of some of the assumptions on which existing CSCW sytems have been based. For the student and researcher, it provides both an introduction to the area, and a set of in-depth studies suitable to inform future research.