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Geopolitical tensions have put the use of strategic trade policy instruments back on the agenda of policy makers. In this paper we investigate the interaction of the threat and use of three unilateral trade policy instruments: embargoes, import price caps and tariffs. In a game-theoretic framework with different scenarios and game variants, we show that the strategic use of the right combination of the respective trade policy instruments can be used to achieve more desirable outcomes for the players. In our setup, a credible threat of a tariff supports the successful implementation of an import price cap. While the results can be generalised, we show the concrete functioning of the interplay of these strategic trade policy instruments in a hypothetical game of resumption of natural gas sales from Russia to the EU. Following the application to this example, we derive policy suggestions to improve the EU's position in the specific game. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the dynamics of human reliance on algorithmic advice in a situation with strategic interaction. Participants played the strategic game of Rock–Paper–Scissors (RPS) under various conditions, receiving algorithmic decision support while facing human or algorithmic opponents. Results indicate that participants often underutilize algorithmic recommendations, particularly after early errors, but increasingly rely on the algorithm following successful early predictions. This behavior demonstrates a sensitivity to decision outcomes, with asymmetry: rejecting advice consistently reinforces rejecting advice again while accepting advice leads to varied reactions based on outcomes. We also investigate how personal characteristics, such as algorithm familiarity and domain experience, influence reliance on algorithmic advice. Both factors positively correlate with increased reliance, and algorithm familiarity significantly moderates the relationship between outcome feedback and reliance. Facing an algorithmic opponent increases advice rejection frequencies, and the determinants of trust and interaction dynamics differ from those with human opponents. Our findings enhance the understanding of algorithm aversion and reliance on AI, suggesting that increasing familiarity with algorithms can improve their integration into decision‐making processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines equilibrium asset prices and leverage in an exchange economy populated with both retail and institutional investors. Institutional investors influence the price of the stocks they trade and are aware of the price impact of the opponent and, thus, interact strategically. Because of the price impact, institutional investors decrease their demand for stocks and lend money to the retail sector, thereby increasing leverage in the economy. The risk-free rate (equity premium) tends to be lower (higher) as compared to an economy populated by retail investors only. Retail investors' compensation for liquidity provision depends on the behavior of institutional investors and the state of the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to form a collaborative governance alliance is crucial to the in-depth promotion of pollution prevention and control. Starting from the perspective of regional development imbalance, this paper uses an evolutionary game model to explore how initial strategy choice, game order, financial and environmental protection expenditure efficiency, and total factor productivity affect the formation and stabilization of the cooperative alliance of “joint prevention and control, cross-regional governance”. The study shows that strategic interactions between governments can lead to “cooperative” or “collusive” outcomes and that game order and initial strategy play a key role in the formation of these outcomes. In addition, changes in parameters such as fiscal and environmental expenditure efficiency and total factor productivity can greatly affect the evolutionary path and the speed of convergence. Particularly in less developed regions, fiscal and environmental spending efficiency plays a crucial role in promoting government “cooperation”, which tends to be weakened by increases in total factor productivity. In contrast, economically developed regions tend to favor “cooperation” and “investment” strategies. This study provides valuable policy recommendations for enhancing interregional cooperation in environmental governance.

I study, both empirically and theoretically, the economic and financial consequences of corporate lobbying. Firms lobby politicians to increase their share of government contracts, but political competition creates firm-level risk, inflating their cost of capital and reducing their incentive to invest in research and development (R&D). I document an annual 6–8% return premium for stocks of high-lobbying firms, which compensates investors for political risk. An estimated model in which firms can lobby and innovate and investors are risk averse replicates key features of corporate lobbying in the U.S. including the well-established paradox that lobbying contributions are small relative to the policies at stake. The model predicts that if investors ceased seeking compensation for political risk, R&D investment would increase by 6% and the innovation rate by 0.4% points. The risk-premium costs of lobbying are quantitatively and economically important even if the resources "wasted" on lobbying are objectively small. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Government financing of charities influences their fundraising and private donations. To analyze competition between charities, we modify the model of fundraising introduced by Andreoni and Payne, where there are two groups of donors and two charities. We concentrate on warm‐glow motivation for giving and highlight strategic interaction in the market for donations. The charities are output‐maximizing, producing services with a purchased input and in‐house managerial supervision. In the absence of public funding, fundraising by charities are strategic complement given fixed costs. We show that block grants can change the nature of the competition, making fundraising strategic substitutes if grants exceed fixed costs. A charity receiving a grant will optimally reduce its fundraising, but the level of service provision will also be affected by the fact that the competing charity will solicit more intensively. The competitor will deliver more services because it benefits from the reduction in solicitation by the grant recipient. In this setting, matching grants work much like block grants as charities in both cases will compete less intensively for donations. That is, incentives for fundraising are weaker with matching grants. However, if both instruments are used the impact of a matching grant depends on whether the block grant over‐ or undercompensates for fixed costs. An optimal funding policy must account for this interaction effect as well as the fungibility of support working through charity competition in the market for donations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a novel framework for investigating learning dynamics on the debt market. Observing a firm's survival of apparently distressed periods, the market eliminates asset value estimates that are too low to be consistent with the observed survival. Therefore, the firm's cost of debt becomes lower for given financials. Relative to a perfect information setting, the firm strategically delays default to benefit from a subsequently lower cost of debt. Default comes as a surprise, as it reveals the currently worst possible asset value as correct. The surprise effect is mitigated for debt with higher performance sensitivity and for lower ex ante information asymmetry. This paper was accepted by Gustavo Manso, finance. Funding: This work was supported by Danmarks Frie Forskningsfond [Grant 0133-00087B], Australian Research Council [Grant DP160104737], the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [Grant 282079427], Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China [Grant 18wkpy36], and the Danish Finance Institute (DFI). Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4632. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We suggest that AI can help decision‐makers learn; specifically, that it can help them learn strategic interactions by serving as artificial training partners and thus help them to overcome a bottleneck of scarce human training partners. We present evidence from chess computers, the first widespread incarnation of AI. Leveraging the staggered diffusion of chess computers, we find that they did indeed help chess players improve by serving as a substitute for scarce human training partners. We also illustrate that chess computers were not a perfect substitute, as players training with them were not exposed to and thus did not learn to exploit idiosyncratic ("human") mistakes. We discuss implications for research on learning, on AI in management and strategy, and on competitive advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Confirming the importance of language to not just relay thoughts but also construct hierarchies, 251 parental advice-seeking letters written at the dawn of the parent education movement in the 1920s and 1930s were coded with the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count computerized text analysis program. An examination of language use patterns shows how parents framed their requests and how they manifested signs of "doing gender" in the process. The fathers' and mothers' letters differed in length, common verb use, negation word use, pronoun use, preposition use, and locus on three summary variables (analytic, authenticity, and clout). They did not differ in the use of words associated with general affect, positive emotion, negative emotion, anger, and anxiety, thus exemplifying how the practice of "doing gender" can be circumstantial. The findings underscore the importance of studying the rhetorical aspects of parental advice-seeking communications and illustrate how language and gender influence these communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financial analysts may have strategic incentives to herd or to anti-herd when issuing forecasts of firms' earnings. This paper develops and implements a new test to examine whether such incentives exist and to identify the form of strategic behaviour. We use the equilibrium property of the finite-player forecasting game of Kim and Shim [2019. "Forecast Dispersion in Finite-Player Forecasting Games." The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics 19 (1).] that forecast dispersion decreases (resp. increases) as the number of forecasters increases if and only if there is strategic complementarity (resp. substitutability) in their forecasts. Using the I/B/E/S database, we find strong evidence that supports strategic herding incentive of financial analysts through a plausible natural experiment setting of brokerage house mergers. We show further that this finding is robust to different forecast horizons and is more pronounced for firms with low initial coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Focusing on the behavior and outcomes, Prisoner's dilemma research rarely encompasses the examination of the effects of (un)awareness. To bridge the research gap, the aim is to outline the deviations that stem from the (un)awareness and to assess its impact on the in-game reasoning, outcome, and modeling. More precisely, through a thought experiment, the overview conceptually encompasses the effects of (un)awareness of game elements (actions, players, and payoffs), differing between awareness in a narrow and broad sense. The deviations due to (un)awareness of game elements show how the game can deviate from the proposed model, whereby unawareness and skewed awareness of the players bear the most prominent differences. Compiling the most notable deviations provokes second thoughts on game theory modeling. The findings on each deviation are shortly discussed and extended to two practical examples to illustrate possible implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking online teaching and knowledge interaction as the research object, this paper studies the game interaction between relevant subjects on online teaching platforms and establishment and stability of online teaching platform ecosystem. For this, based on the idea of platform ecosystem, this paper establishes a three-way evolutionary game model involving knowledge providers, knowledge demanders and online teaching platforms, and reveals the operating mechanism of online teaching platform ecosystem. The results show that the differences of supply income, platform income and platform extra income have a positive impact on knowledge providers and strategy choice of online teaching platforms. The diference of cost has a negative impact on the strategy choice of participants, and also affects the strategy choice of other parties. The income influence coefficients of online teaching platform ecosystem participants mutually influence the strategic choice of other parties. The online teaching platform has a positive impact on income influence coefficient of the knowledge providers as well as strategy selection of online teaching platforms, and the income influence coefficient of deep learning has a positive impact on strategy selection of all of the three parties. With an increase of online teaching platform rewards, knowledge providers and online teaching platform strategies have evolved from participation and maintenance to deep participation and active development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The incomplete enforcement of environmental regulations in China is a serious issue in environmental protection affairs, and this paper attempts to provide a new explanation for its prevalence from the perspective of strategic interaction. Under Chinese decentralization, environmental regulations are seen by local governments as a tool to compete for scarce resources, which leads to strategic interactions between regions. Therefore, under the theoretical framework of regional policy spillovers, this paper examines the strategic interaction behavior of local governments in environmental regulation with a spatial econometric approach research methodology based on panel data of 29 Chinese provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the central government) from 2015 to 2019, taking spatial interdependence and the strategic interaction relationship of local governments as the entry point. The study finds that the intensity of environmental regulation in a region is not only related to the characteristics of the region, but also related to the intensity of environmental regulation in competing provinces, and there is a significant strategic interaction of environmental regulation behavior between regions, which is manifested as complementary spatial strategies. If the neighboring provinces invest more in environmental regulation, the region will also strengthen its level of environmental regulation accordingly, showing the contagiousness of non-complete enforcement of environmental regulation. At the same time, the complementary strategic interaction behavior of environmental regulation between regions has weakened since 2017, which highlights the role of green environmental performance assessment. Based on this, this paper proposes to provide a policy reference to avoid the environmental regulation enforcement dilemma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the relation between incentive plans based on relative performance and competitive aggressiveness. Using data on executive incentive‐compensation contracts in large U.S. firms, we find a positive association between competitive aggressiveness and peer group overlap—that is, the extent to which two firms select each other as peers in these incentive plans. Our findings indicate that managers of such firms take more frequent as well as more complex competitive actions, relative to managers evaluated on relative performance without peer group overlap. Moreover, we show that these competitive tactics are more pronounced when managers compete against: (1) peers with similar grant sizes, (2) peers on similar performance metrics, and (3) peers in the same industry. Collectively, our findings provide evidence on how widely used incentive‐compensation practices relate to strategic firm decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local governments are at the heart of implementing increasingly ambitious national plans for wind energy. While support by local governments for these plans has been studied extensively, only few studies have looked into local governments' contestation of wind energy development. In this paper we analyze contentious governance processes in which local governments join efforts with citizen action groups to oppose projects proposed by developers or the national government. We focus on the strategic dilemmas that local governments face while engaging in contentious governance. Uncovering strategic dilemmas helps to see contestation by local governments as part of a web of governance relationships, thus moving beyond dichotomous understandings of the players involved in wind farm conflicts. Strategic dilemmas also allow understanding of how stances of local governments and their citizen allies change over time, and how strategic and tactical considerations emerge from interaction patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizational coordination has been regarded as a vital factor to determine the environmental governance efficiency of local authority, while existing empirical studies mainly discuss the vertical decentralization but largely ignore the horizontal cross-departmental interaction within single government. Based on the data of 31 Chinese provinces from 2003 to 2017, this paper uses a panel vector autoregression (PVAR) approach, two-way fixed-effect models and dynamic panel regression with system generalized method of moments estimation (SYS-GMM) to investigate the environmental strategic interaction between two representative departments (finance department and environmental protection department) within local governments. The results indicate, on the whole, their environmental governance strategies show a significantly co-directional coordination. However, the cross-departmental interaction obviously varied in different periods and regions (even showed as conflict sometimes), and was synchronized with the dynamic trade-off between economic and environmental targets of China. This research helps understand the inner logic of environmental governance of Chinese government, and can be valuable guidance for other countries to accomplish multi-departmental sustainable development goal. • Departments of China's local governments have co-directional environmental governance strategies. • Cross-departmental interaction obviously varied for different periods and regions. • Cross-departmental coordination is insignificant in western provinces. • Cross-departmental interaction evolved with the dynamic economy-environment trade-off. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, fast fashion has boosted global production and consumption, decreasing the lifespans of garments and increasing volumes of discarded textiles which are neither reusable or recyclable. Consequently, multiple visions and strategies regarding circular fashion have been developed, addressing a broad range of features pertaining to a potential circular fashion system. Most remain vague about concrete ambitions and policy measures. However, the design of transition pathways involves a good understanding of the policy instruments among stakeholders that operate in a globalized industry with complex value chains. In this study, we investigate stakeholder support for policy instruments that could contribute towards a circular and sustainable fashion system. We identify 30 aspects of a circular fashion system, based on a screening of visions and strategies published by supranational bodies, NGOs, and sectoral organizations. Then, we present survey and focus group results, displaying broad stakeholder support for government intervention, particularly mandatory regulations. A plausible explanation is the prisoner's dilemma most stakeholders face regarding global value chains, indicating the need for a more level playing field. We identify and address the differences between stakeholder preferences and conclude that mandatory regulations appear to be a necessary but not a sufficient condition for a transition towards a circular fashion system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the intensification of urban land resource scarcity, this study attempted to explore the formation paths and direction of forcing the improvement of urban land use efficiency by means of price. Using the panel data of 280 prefecture-level cities from 2007 to 2019 and using the dynamic spatial Durbin model, this article systematically described the short-term and long-term effects of land price rises on the improvement of urban land use efficiency from the overall level and the level of sub-use scale, and investigated the strategic interaction of local governments in cities of the same scale in the face of price changes. The results showed that, at the overall level, the rise in urban land prices improved the urban land use efficiency in the experimental area but inhibited the efficiency of surrounding areas. At the level of sub-use scale, the results showed that: ① The rise in the price of commercial and residential land promoted the improvement of efficiency in the short term, and the impact was gradually weakened in the long term. In addition, in the short term, the ‘siphon effect’ was mainly reflected in the strategic interaction between governments. In the long run, the ‘demonstration effect’ was mainly reflected among large cities of the same size, while the ‘siphon effect’ was mainly reflected among small and medium-sized cities. ② Industrial land prices did not significantly improve efficiency in the short term, but played a more obvious role in the long term. In the short term, the ‘siphon effect’ was mainly reflected in the strategic interaction between governments. In the long run, the ‘demonstration effect’ was mainly reflected among large cities of the same size, while the ‘siphon effect’ was reflected among small and medium-sized cities. Therefore, for commercial and residential land, we should continue to deepen the ‘bidding, auction, and listing’ transfer system and the reform of the fiscal and tax systems to avoid the phenomenon of offering only to ‘those with the highest price’. For industrial land, combining an effective marketization mechanism with efficient government management and setting up a refined, multi-level collaborative management system throughout the different stages is conducive to the improvement of the efficiency of land use over the long term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the motives for cooperation in the one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma (PD). A prior study finds that cooperation rates in one-shot PD games can be ranked empirically by the social surplus from cooperation. That study employs symmetric payoffs from cooperation in simultaneous PD games. Hence, in that setting, it is not possible to discern the motives for cooperation since three prominent social welfare criteria, social surplus (efficiency) preferences, Rawlsian maximin preferences, and inequity aversion make the same predictions. In the present paper, we conduct an experiment to identify which of these social preferences best explains differences in cooperation rates and to study the effects of the risk of non-cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Boko Haram insurgency has presented a peculiar theatre of unconventional warfare. The combat dynamics of the belligerents have oscillated between the asymmetries of hard and soft violence. While the insurgents have been able to sustain their violent campaign mainly through tactical opportunism based on irregular strategies, including suicide terrorism, the government forces have been locked in intractable counter-insurgency operations where their military might has often been demystified and overwhelmed by the irregular strategies of the insurgents. This has resulted in a precarious and protracted counter-insurgency scenario in which the dynamics of violence tend to have put the government forces under sapping pressure, whilst the insurgent forces have prevailed in an asymmetrical advantage. The way out of this intractable violence is for the government to be pragmatic in its current combat-offensive counter-insurgency by adopting a hybrid approach that is capable of countering both the military and non-military dimensions of the terror-insurgency conundrum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Haze pollution has drawn lots of public concern due to its potential damages to human health. Strategic interaction of environmental regulation among local governments may lead to a race to the bottom and hinder air quality improvement. Still, current empirical evidence is scarce, especially from developing countries. Based on province-level panel data from 2004 to 2015, the paper employs a dynamic fixed effect spatial Durbin model to identify interactive patterns of environmental regulation and then investigate its environmental impact. Empirical results indicate that regional differences are observed in environmental regulation and haze pollution, and high-high and low-low clusters dominate the spatial pattern. Interactive patterns of economically similar provinces are dominated by strategic substitution, whereas provinces sharing common borders or belonging to the same region are dominated by strategic complementation. Further, both race to the bottom and race to the top effect are discovered in the asymmetric test. The reaction coefficient values are much more extensive when competitors implement laxer policies, indicating a more significant racing trend to the bottom. Overall, after controlling for the spillover effect and hysteresis effect of haze pollution, the strategic interaction of environmental regulation among provinces is not conducive to improve air quality. The consequence might be correlated with low environmental standards, weak regulation enforcement, and the "free-ride" motive in China. These findings will be of great significance for optimizing local government behavior and improving air quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to form a collaborative governance alliance is crucial to the in-depth promotion of pollution prevention and control. Starting from the perspective of regional development imbalance, this paper uses an evolutionary game model to explore how initial strategy choice, game order, financial and environmental protection expenditure efficiency, and total factor productivity affect the formation and stabilization of the cooperative alliance of "joint prevention and control, cross-regional governance". The study shows that strategic interactions between governments can lead to "cooperative" or "collusive" outcomes and that game order and initial strategy play a key role in the formation of these outcomes. In addition, changes in parameters such as fiscal and environmental expenditure efficiency and total factor productivity can greatly affect the evolutionary path and the speed of convergence. Particularly in less developed regions, fiscal and environmental spending efficiency plays a crucial role in promoting government "cooperation", which tends to be weakened by increases in total factor productivity. In contrast, economically developed regions tend to favor "cooperation" and "investment" strategies. This study provides valuable policy recommendations for enhancing interregional cooperation in environmental governance., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (© 2024 The Authors.)

This study investigates the moderating role of strategic interaction on the relationship between bank lending and macroeconomic factors, using panel data on Vietnamese commercial banks over 2008–2018. We find that the effect of macroeconomic and monetary policy shocks on bank lending behaviour is less pronounced when banks engage in a less competitively aggressive environment. The study contributes to the literature of bank lending by incorporating macroeconomic environment and micro (strategic interaction)-level to analyze the lending behaviour of an individual bank. Since the analysis of macroeconomic factors alone is insufficient to explain the aggregate relationships in the model of banking, understanding the nature of strategic interaction is essential to predetermine how bank lending behaviour relates to the transmission mechanism of monetary policy.

Current work on multi-agent systems at King's College London is extensive, though largely based in two research groups within the Department of Informatics: the Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) thematic group and the Reasoning & Planning (RAP) thematic group. DAI combines AI expertise with political and economic theories and data, to explore social and technological contexts of interacting intelligent entities. It develops computational models for analysing social, political and economic phenomena to improve the effectiveness and fairness of policies and regulations, and combines intelligent agent systems, software engineering, norms, trust and reputation, agent-based simulation, communication and provenance of data, knowledge engineering, crowd computing and semantic technologies, and algorithmic game theory and computational social choice, to address problems arising in autonomous systems, financial markets, privacy and security, urban living and health. RAP conducts research in symbolic models for reasoning involving argumentation, knowledge representation, planning, and other related areas, including development of logical models of argumentation-based reasoning and decision-making, and their usage for explainable AI and integration of machine and human reasoning, as well as combining planning and argumentation methodologies for strategic argumentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the form and sources of strategic interaction in China's public services among local governments. The results indicate the existence of positive strategic interaction in provincial public services, with multiple sources of interaction, ranging from a direct mechanism, such as the spillover effect of yardstick competition among local governments, to an indirect mechanism, such as the resource flow effect under population mobility and market integration. Nevertheless, the obstacle of economic catch-up and hukou system reduces the interaction intensity. Furthermore, strategic interaction causes provincial public services to converge to a consistent level, indicating an equalization trend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is devoted to the study of the Eurasian vector in the international politics of Russia, including the Russian-Chinese relations at the present stage, participation in the Eurasian Economic Union, other interstate associations created by the states of the Asia-Pacific region. The authors have studied and analyzed the defining directions and features of Russian-Chinese foreign policy relations, both in the historical context and at the present stage of development. In particular, the main periods in the development of bilateral relations are outlined; the factors that influenced the change in the strategies of foreign policy interaction between the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China are analyzed; the nature of Russian-Chinese cooperation at the present stage is revealed, its role and importance both for regional policy and in the light of ongoing international processes, including in the field of international security, are characterized; identified possible risks that could negatively affect the nature of foreign policy interaction between Russia and China. The study concludes with conclusions and proposals related to the assessment of the political and international legal interaction of Russia in the integration track of Eurasian policy.

The incomplete enforcement of environmental regulation by local governments will lead to environmental degradation. While the strategy selection for local governments is a complex dynamic system. To explore the evolution law of local governments' strategies, a heterogeneous urban agglomeration network system is constructed. The interactive law of the two strategies: execution and non-execution, as well as the influence of game revenue and supervision probability on evolution results, are discussed through multi-stage simulation analysis. It found that when there is at least one type of subject whose revenue of adopting execution strategy is greater than that of adopting non-execution strategy, the execution strategy spread rapidly in urban agglomeration and reach a significant and relatively stable dominant state. When the two strategies are in a state of repeated competition, central government can improve the interaction trend them by strengthening supervision, and thus promote the transformation from incomplete enforcement to full enforcement of environmental regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a market economy where two rational agents are able to learn the distribution of future events. In this context, we study whether moving away from the standard Bayesian belief updating, in the sense of under-reaction to some degree to new information, may be strategically convenient for traders. We show that, in equilibrium, strong under-reaction occurs, thus rational agents may strategically want to bias their learning process. Our analysis points out that the underlying mechanism driving ex-ante strategical decisions is diversity seeking. Finally, we show that, even if robust with respect to strategy selection, strong under-reaction can generate low realized welfare levels because of a long transient phase in which the agent makes poor predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the new century, the strategic interaction between Japan and India has heated up gradually, which is manifested in the increasing frequency, deepening and extending of the strategic interaction. The goal of strategic interaction between Japan and India is certain to enhance their international influence through historical exchanges, to boost their respective geographical advantages to boost the economy, and to take advantage of changes in the international system to try to jointly suppress the rise of China. The investment environment of India is difficult to improve in the short term, the military budget of the Indian navy is insufficient, the countermeasures from China, the prevention of Japan and India by the United States and the attention of international public opinion bring uncertainty to the effectiveness of the strategic interaction between Japan and India. However, the frequent strategic interaction between Japan and India after the new century will still affect China's economic construction, the settlement of China's disputes and internal affairs and the maintenance of China's oil road safety to some extent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing countries are notorious for their enforcement gap in environmental regulation. Despite policymakers and scholars focusing on this phenomenon in China, there is little literature to explore the cause for its prevalence. This paper aims to explain this occurrence from the perspective of strategic interactions among the local governments in China based on the yardstick competition theory. Employing spatial panel data models, we use a panel dataset of Chinese cities to investigate strategic interactions in environmental regulation and identify their possible sources. The results depict a confirmative picture of strategic interactions in environmental regulation among Chinese cities, suggesting that the cities tend to imitate their neighbours and implement looser environmental regulation in response to the decreasing stringency in neighbouring cities. This transmission effect demonstrates the prevalence of incomplete implementation of environmental regulation. Moreover, the imitative actions vary across Chinese cities, as they are observed in eastern and western cities but not in central cities. In addition, the imitative actions are significantly weaker when environmental governance gains a higher degree of salience, indicating that green performance appraisals reduce strategic interactions among local governments. Finally, strategic interactions are found to originate from the fiscal decentralization system, and are strengthened by the turnover of the municipal party secretary or a younger one.

We develop a new design for the experimental beauty-contest game (BCG) that is suitable for children in school age and test it with 114 schoolchildren aged 9–11 years as well as with adults. In addition, we collect a measure for cognitive skills to link these abilities with successful performance in the game. Results demonstrate that children can successfully understand and play a BCG. Choices start at a slightly higher level than those of adults but learning over time and depth of reasoning are largely comparable with the results of studies run with adults. Cognitive skills, measured as fluid IQ, are predictive only of whether children choose weakly dominated strategies but are neither associated with lower choices in the first round nor with successful performance in the BCG. In the implementation of our new design of the BCG with adults we find results largely in line with behavior in the classical BCG. Our new design for the experimental BCG allows to study the development of strategic interaction skills starting already in school age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the economy of renewable resources, oil-importing countries seek to explore and develop backstop technologies to moderate their reliance on oil suppliers. On the other hand, oil-exporting countries should integrate the possibility of backstop technology inventions in their decisions regarding oil supply. Therefore oil-exporting countries and oil-importing-countries essentially have a relationship in the form of strategic interdependence. The present study considers a dynamic game between a buyer and a seller, where the seller determines the supply quantity and the buyer can decide to invest in a substitute which is a renewable source that is more favorable for both the buyer and the environment. The results show that in this closed-loop equilibrium, due to the heterogeneity between the fuel supplied by the seller and the alternative fuel developed by the buyer, the time of investing depends on the investment cost and the positive impact of substitute fuel on the environment. Nevertheless, the time of investing is more likely to occur before the resource exhaustion.

The incomplete enforcement of environmental regulations in China is a serious issue in environmental protection affairs, and this paper attempts to provide a new explanation for its prevalence from the perspective of strategic interaction. Under Chinese decentralization, environmental regulations are seen by local governments as a tool to compete for scarce resources, which leads to strategic interactions between regions. Therefore, under the theoretical framework of regional policy spillovers, this paper examines the strategic interaction behavior of local governments in environmental regulation with a spatial econometric approach research methodology based on panel data of 29 Chinese provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the central government) from 2015 to 2019, taking spatial interdependence and the strategic interaction relationship of local governments as the entry point. The study finds that the intensity of environmental regulation in a region is not only related to the characteristics of the region, but also related to the intensity of environmental regulation in competing provinces, and there is a significant strategic interaction of environmental regulation behavior between regions, which is manifested as complementary spatial strategies. If the neighboring provinces invest more in environmental regulation, the region will also strengthen its level of environmental regulation accordingly, showing the contagiousness of non-complete enforcement of environmental regulation. At the same time, the complementary strategic interaction behavior of environmental regulation between regions has weakened since 2017, which highlights the role of green environmental performance assessment. Based on this, this paper proposes to provide a policy reference to avoid the environmental regulation enforcement dilemma.

This contribution looks into the illocutionary act of assertion which takes part in weaving contemporary digital-age narratives through the lens of Frankfurt's notion of bullshit from two perspectives, the speaker's and the hearer's, as they evaluate assertoric competence for different public asserters. It focuses on the action component of asserting, which is an act of engaging the speaker's responsibility, and attempts to problematize bullshit assertions through the notion of fact-checking. The discussion is conducted using examples of bullshit assertions performed in strategic interaction contexts – contexts in which speakers pursue a strategic goal and attempt to anticipate the acts of their interlocutors, as speakers and hearers work to project a particular social image of themselves. • Bullshit (post-truth) assertion is made with no regard to truth. • Assertoric competence is evaluated on criteria which do not involve truth. • Speakers do not regard themselves responsible for bullshit assertions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the emerging sociology of mind-sport as a new area of research by showing how everyday interaction and life skills are sharpened and honed through strategic interaction at the bridge table. Using the example of the card game bridge, the article explores how elite players engage in time-consuming and repetitive performances that display their ongoing impression management and strategic interaction work. Through interviews with 52 elite bridge players, the article argues that preparation and practice are required to improve play, alongside the ability to combine deception with notions of skilfully supportive transparent play. These contradictions are played out through learning to read the impressions given off by other players as well as plan in a disciplined manner for mistakes made at the table and to support their partner through silence. Using an interactionist framework, this article illustrates how strategic interaction and impression management are skills continually worked on in high-pressured and competitive environments. The article demonstrates the ways that everyday interaction practices are enhanced by and through a competitive mind-sport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local governments have strategic interactions in the enforcement of environmental regulations（ERs）. Current studies have paid more attention on the investigation of strategic interaction patterns. However, due to regional heterogeneity, the interest demands in the tradeoff between economic development and environmental protection are different, thus showing different sensitivities to environmental regulation changes in neighboring areas. But research in this area has not received enough attention. To fill this gap, this paper firstly constructed a theoretical analytical framework based on the heterogeneity of economic growth, fiscal pressure, employment pressure and industrial structure, and then selected four indicators including real GDP growth rate, fiscal deficit ratio, unemployment rate, and the proportion of pollution-intensive output value to GDP to conduct an empirical test. Based on province-level panel data from 2004 to 2015, an asymmetric spatial econometric model was constructed from both static and dynamic dimensions, and the two-stage GMM method was used to test the sensitivity of environmental regulation interactions. The results indicated that regions with low economic growth rate, low fiscal deficit ratio, high unemployment rate, or with high proportion of pollution-intensive industries were more sensitive to their neighbors’ adjustment of ERs, and were supported by at least two types of spatial weight matrices. After using 2 SLS approach to re-estimate, adjusting the quantile of sensitivity indicator, and changing the measurement of environmental regulation stringency indicator, the results were still robust. Additionally, strategic interactions in these provinces were dominated by strategic substitution, and ‘race to the bottom’（RTB） or ‘race to the top’（RTT） was a local phenomenon. In areas where both RTB and RTT existed, the intensity of RTB was generally higher than that of RTT. Regions with high proportion of pollution-intensive industries were inclined to RTB, which was mainly concentrated in the areas adjacent to the border and with similar economic development level. Furthermore, there were significant dynamic changes in the strategic interaction of ERs. The ‘11 th Five-Year Plan’ period and 2014 were vital turning points of structural changes, which might be related to the adjustment of central performance assessment indicators and the improvement of ER intensity. Finally, policy implications are proposed from balancing the economic development and environment, optimizing the performance assessment indicators of local governments, optimizing the distribution of pollution-intensive industries, and promoting regional cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Business platforms delivering Mobility-as-a-Service (M a a S), alongside providing additional user services, have been shown to bring important price strategic interaction impacts which can be welfare improving. We show that the Integrator platform, whose structure alleviates harmful price externalities with two operators, such that it everywhere welfare dominates the Free-Market, can also limit beneficial competitive forces with more operators, reversing this welfare ordering. This is important since M a a S envisages platforms bringing together multiple operators and services in practice. However, calibrations show that where the Integrator platform fails to outperform the Free-Market (with higher operator numbers and lower substitutability), a new platform-based model that we introduce, is optimal. Furthermore, the Integrator is promoted in welfare terms in the presence of non-trivial marginal costs and mid- to high-end market demand elasticities, conditions both consistent with the inclusion in the M a a S journey mix of taxi cabs and other on-demand services which are common-place in M a a S offerings. We also introduce a number of extensions to the modelling framework incorporating additional real network characteristics. Though this can result in the welfare supremacy of the Integrator relative to the Free-Market being undermined, it again tends to be restored under mid- to high-range market elasticity calibrations. Finally, profit incentives tend to neither align across platform providers and operators, nor promote the welfare-best regime, indicating potential for regulatory oversight. • A MaaS business platform framework is extended from n = 2 to the n -operator case. • Integrator welfare supremacy is not robust to higher n or new network features. • Integrator welfare dominance can return under mid/high industry elasticities. • The Integrator and a new platform model, MTC, share the top welfare ranking. • Profit and welfare incentives tend not to align across regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From mid-2015 to early 2016, more than a million refugees and migrants arrived in Europe, after having crossed the Mediterranean Sea. Sweden quickly emerged as one of the main destinations they aspired to reach. During the so-called refugee crisis of 2015–2016, the city of Malmö became the management center for the reception of refugees. In this context, a series of interplays emerged between governmental institutions (GIs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and social movement organizations (SMOs) involved in helping the refugees. Looking at the refugee crisis in Malmö through the lens of an interactionist approach to contentious politics, this article analyzes the strategic interplay between SMOs, NGOs, and GIs in the different phases of the crisis, as well as scrutinizes the conditions that facilitated or hindered cooperation among the actors. Results show that the crisis initially strengthened the role of SMOs, but that in order to enter into lasting and established forms of cooperation with NGOs and institutionalized politics, SMOs had to meet three conditions: 1) have a clear organizational structure, 2) downplay their political ideology, and 3) assume a complementary position to the other actors involved. For most SMOs, this limited their maneuverability, leading them to adopt one of three possible strategies: adapting to the new conditions, challenging the rules and players of the arena, or exiting the arena altogether.