Signaling Games In Political Science

First Published in 1991. This monograph surveys the current literature on game theoretic models of strategic information transmission in politics. Such work generalises earlier models by allowing relevant information to be asymmetrically held by agents, and subsequently studying the willingness and ability of these agents to transmit information through their actions. The monograph includes models of agenda control in legislatures and elections, veto threats and debate, electoral competition, regulation building, bargaining in the shadow of war and sophisticated voting. Within each topic the principal focus is on how the presence of asymmetric information enriches the strategic environment of the participants as well as how it rationalises certain types of political behavior and political institutions as equilibrium phenomena in an 'incomplete information' world.

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1991. This monograph surveys the current literature on game theoretic models of strategic information transmission in politics. Such work generalises earlier models by allowing relevant information to be asymmetrically held by agents, and subsequently studying the willingness and ability of these agents to transmit information through their actions. The monograph includes models of agenda control in legislatures and elections, veto threats and debate, electoral competition, regulation building, bargaining in the shadow of war and sophisticated voting. Within each topic the principal focus is on how the presence of asymmetric information enriches the strategic environment of the participants as well as how it rationalises certain types of political behavior and political institutions as equilibrium phenomena in an 'incomplete information' world.

In this chapter the topic of this book is introduced. Section 1. 1 provides a brief and rather general motivation for the scientific project undertaken here. Interest groups are a very popular object of scientific inquiry, and they received already considerable research attention from scholars in political science, as well as from researchers in economics. Necessarily, then, this book adds to a literature which is already quite developed. A detailed positioning in this literature of the theoretical material presented in this monograph will be given in Chapter 2. This second chapter will also, by means of a review of the empirical literature, provide a more general overview of the issues deemed to be important when studying the influence of interest groups on public policy. The outline of the entire book is described in greater detail in Section 1. 2. As most issues involved are more easily presented in later chapters, this introductory chapter is kept brief. 1. 1 MOTIVATION Substantial political power is often attributed to interest groups. Examples abound in both the economics and political science literature, as well as in journalistic accounts and popular publications. On many occasions the authors express concerns about the negative impact of interest groups on the democratic quality of government. "The interests of a small group are served at the expense of the interests of the general public, the taxpayers!", is an often heard popular complaint.

Game theory is the mathematical analysis of strategic interaction. In the fifty years since the appearance of von Neumann and Morgenstern's classic Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton, 1944), game theory has been widely applied to problems in economics. Until recently, however, its usefulness in political science has been underappreciated, in part because of the technical difficulty of the methods developed by economists. James Morrow's book is the first to provide a standard text adapting contemporary game theory to political analysis. It uses a minimum of mathematics to teach the essentials of game theory and contains problems and their solutions suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in all branches of political science. Morrow begins with classical utility and game theory and ends with current research on repeated games and games of incomplete information. The book focuses on noncooperative game theory and its application to international relations, political economy, and American and comparative politics. Special attention is given to models of four topics: bargaining, legislative voting rules, voting in mass elections, and deterrence. An appendix reviews relevant mathematical techniques. Brief bibliographic essays at the end of each chapter suggest further readings, graded according to difficulty. This rigorous but accessible introduction to game theory will be of use not only to political scientists but also to psychologists, sociologists, and others in the social sciences.

DIVExplains how game theory can be used to explain political phenomena /div

This collection explores the fundamental assumptions of game theory modelling. It includes a theory of game pay-off formation, a theory of preference aggregation, discussions of the effects of interdependence between preferences upon various game structures, analyses of the impact of incomplete information upon dynamic games of negotiation, and a study using differential games. Numerous illustrations, case studies and comparative case studies show the relevance of the theoretical debate. The work is organized to develop the fundamentals for those readers with a limited knowledge of game theory.