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Stakeholder negotiation is an increasingly important policymaking tool. However, relatively little is understood about the relationship between the structure of the negotiating process and the effectiveness with which stakeholders can pursue their individual interests. We apply the Rausser-Simon multilateral bargaining model to a specific negotiation process involving water storage capacity and use in the upper Adour Basin in southwestern France. We focus on a coalition of three stakeholder groups with aligned but distinct interests. In addition to the standard indices of bargaining power-the distribution of political weights ("access") and players' utilities if an agreement is not reached, our analysis identifi es other less obvious sources of power. First, a coalition member may benefit when his access is reduced if the redistribution increases the access of another coalition member who has a more favorable "strategic location." Second, the interests of the coalition as a whole will usually, but not always, be advanced if its members cede access to a "spokesman" representing their common interests. However, some members may be adversely affected. Third, restricting the extent to which coalition members can make proposals that further their own individual interests at the expense of other coalition members will usually, but not always, harm the coalition as a whole.

Negotiation is an important and pervasive form of social interaction. The task of designing and implementing autonomous agents with negotiation competence is usually understood as involving the consideration of insights from multiple relevant research areas to integrate different perspectives on negotiation. Hence, this paper uses both game-theoretic techniques and methods from the social sciences as a basis to develop autonomous negotiating agents. It employs game-theoretic techniques to define equilibrium strategies for the bargaining game of alternating offers, and formalizes a set of negotiation strategies and tactics studied in the social sciences and frequently used by human negotiators. This paper also lays the foundation for performing an experiment to investigate the behaviour of autonomous agents equipped with the strategies, paying particular attention to the quality and the cost of bargaining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an automated sealed-bid design for multi-issue negotiation. In our negotiation model, both agents simultaneously submit their offers to the mediate agent. Each agent has a representation of its desired attributes for a trading commodity using fuzzy linguistic terms. This method is flexible for the agents to offer according to own demand, taking into account the interdependencies between the attributes. It is important to emphasize that proposed bargaining method is carried out under incomplete information, and agents΄ information about own parameters are considered completely private. The design can discourage counter-speculation and effectively control fraud and misrepresentation in a certain extent. In addition, using the proposed method of calculating agreed-price, agents can be stimulated to reach an agreement as early as possible. Through a case study, the capabilities of the proposed method are illustrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter, we review the recent literature on conflict and appropriation. Allowing for the possibility of conflict, which amounts to recognizing the possibility that property rights are not perfectly and cost-lessly enforced, represents a significant departure from the traditional paradigm of economics. The research we emphasize, however, takes an economic perspective. Specifically, it applies conventional optimization techniques and game-theoretic tools to study the allocation of resources among competing activities - productive and otherwise appropriative, such as grabbing the product and wealth of others as well as defending one's own product and wealth. In contrast to other economic activities in which inputs are combined cooperatively through production functions, the inputs to appropriation are combined adversarially through technologies of conflict. A central objective of this research is to identify the effects of conflict on economic outcomes: the determinants of the distribution of output (or power) and how an individual party's share can be inversely related to its marginal productivity; when settlement in the shadow of conflict and when open conflict can be expected to occur, with longer time horizons capable of inducing conflict instead of settlement; how conflict and appropriation can reduce the appeal of trade; the determinants of alliance formation and the importance of intra-alliance commitments; how dynamic incentives for capital accumulation and innovation are distorted in the presence of conflict; and the role of governance in conflict management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This book has been about the development of economic interests and movements for greater sovereignty. Using my analytic framework of imagined economies, I have examined the experience of Russian regional autonomy movements in the early 1990s and have argued that regional economic interests are intersubjective, contingent, and institutionally specific, and likewise, that the economic basis of the sovereignty movement in Sverdlovsk was a function of local understandings of the economy and particular institutional contexts. Two last points on the role of institutional context need to be made to conclude and extend this analysis. First, I will discuss how attention to institutional context and social understandings, in particular the orthodox and heterodox interplay during perestroika, help us to understand both the timing of nationalist movements in the USSR and the end of the Soviet system. Second, I will briefly outline how the changing institutional context helps explain how regional economic demands were transformed in the post-1993 period. Finally, I will consider some implications of the imagined economies framework for further research in political economy, the constructivist paradigm, and studies of nationalism. Timing of Nationalist Movements and the End of the Soviet System One of the most intriguing questions of Russian and Soviet politics is why the USSR collapsed. And what explains its timing in the late 1980s rather than earlier? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Federalism and sovereignty movements in Russia during 1990–3 have mainly been examined in terms of the actions of non-Russian ethnic republics. To gain a deeper understanding of the economic basis of sovereignty and autonomy movements for all regions of Russia, in this chapter I test existing explanations on an original data set that captures the spectrum of sovereignty-oriented activism among the Russian regions (oblasts and krais). I show that economic variables found in traditional quantitative data sets and used in previous explanations do not explain the pattern of Russian regionalism very well, but I analyze the complexity of economic data in Russia to suggest a different approach to the role of economic factors in sovereignty movements. Regions and Federalism in the USSR and Russia Any discussion of regionalism and federalism in the USSR and Russia must begin with an acknowledgment of the fact that the USSR was territorially divided in a very complicated way. The administrative and ethnic territorial divisions that constituted the state were irregular, uneven, and subject to change over the course of Soviet history. They were also fundamental in making and breaking the Soviet state. Beyond urban and rural districts, there were, broadly speaking, three main administrative levels in the USSR, although not all levels existed in every territorial unit. As shown in Table 1.1, as of 1989, there were 15 union republics (Sovetskaia Sotsialisticheskaia respublika or Soviet Socialist Republic, SSR), whose specific names and institutional structures corresponded to ethnic groups (e.g., Estonian SSR, Ukrainian SSR). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contracts … have a major drawback: the transaction costs of arranging and enforcing them. Because of these costs, members of a group may find it more welfare maximizing to honor the default rules that third parties have set. Among the most important discretionary powers of the president has been the naming and removal of governors, the president's premier agents in their respective states. The relationship between the president and the governors has been a peculiar one, defying the system of electoral justice successfully imposed at the federal level and routinely violating the federal pact. This chapter details the president's “hiring” and “firing” of the governors, and the governors' “hiring” and “firing” of the mayors, throughout the twentieth century, demonstrating the strong and arbitrary tradition of presidential imposition (whether “papered over” by elections or not), which was only recently cast aside by President Vicente Fox for a new standard of more gentle executive-branch intervention. I argue through discussion of the aggregate cases of presidential appointment and dismissal, as well as through three case studies from the early 1990s, that if the federal electoral courts discussed in the last chapter offered electoral justice success stories, gubernatorial races epitomized institutional failure during the crucial decades of Mexico's protracted transition. Given this broad pre-2000 range in outcomes of the institutions of electoral justice (ranging from institutional accountability at the federal level to widespread failure at the gubernatorial level), I argue that mayoral races occupy the middle of this spectrum between successful and failed electoral justice outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]