Demonstration of power: Experimental results on bilateral bargaining

We test the empirical effectiveness of two theoretical proposals to equilibrate bargaining power in bilateral bargaining. Our experimental design is based on the two-player versions of the multibidding game (Pérez-Castrillo & Wettstein, 2001) and the bid-and-propose game (Navarro & Perea, 2005). Both models build on the ultimatum game and balance parties’ bargaining power by auctioning the role of the proposer in the first stage. We find that proposers learn how to send an acceptable proposal by trial and error, guided by responders’ rejections. The observed behavior stabilizes for the final experimental rounds and the payoff gap between the proposer and the responder seems to close down. However, the strategies chosen by subjects are remarkably different from the theoretical ones.     

UNSCRIPTED DRAMA: SOCCER AUDIENCE RESPONSE TO SUSPENSE,SURPRISE, AND SHOCK

By modeling minute-by-minute television audience figures from English Premier League soccer matches, with close to 50,000 minute-observations, we show that demand is partly driven by suspense and surprise. We also identify an additional relevant factor of appeal to audiences, namely shock, which refers to the difference between pre-match and current game outcome probabilities. Suspense, surprise, and shock remain significant in the presence of a traditional measure of outcome uncertainty. (JEL C23, D12, L82, L83, Z20)     

SUSTAINABILITY OF THE FRIEDMAN RULE IN AN INTERNATIONAL MONETARY POLICY GAME

This article develops a two-country monetary economy model in order to analyze the international monetary policy game between governments and the domestic monetary policy game between each government and its private sector. We prove that if governments can commit to their own private sectors, the cooperative equilibrium of the game between governments is for them to follow the Friedman rule. When governments lack such ability to commit, we find that the Friedman rule is more likely to be sustained in our open-economy model than in the closed-economy model of Ireland. ( JEL E31, E52, E61)     

On the adjudication of conflicting claims: an experimental study

This paper reports an experimental study on three well-known solutions for problems of adjudicating conflicting claims: the constrained equal awards, the proportional, and the constrained equal losses rules. We first let subjects play three games designed such that the unique equilibrium allocation coincides with the recommendation of one of these three rules. In addition, we let subjects play an additional game that has the property that all (and only) strategy profiles in which players coordinate on the same rule constitute a strict Nash equilibrium. While in the first three games subjects’ play easily converges to the unique equilibrium rule, in the last game the proportional rule overwhelmingly prevails as a coordination device, especially when we frame the game as an hypothetical bankruptcy situation. We also administered a questionnaire to a different group of students, asking them to act as impartial arbitrators to solve (among others) the same problems played in the lab. Also in this case, respondents were sensitive to the framing of the questions, but the proportional rule was selected by the vast majority of respondents.     

Multilateral bargaining with subjective claims under majority vs. unanimity rule: An experiment

We experimentally investigate the effects of subjective claims in a multilateral bargaining game. Claims are induced by having subjects ‘produce’ the surplus to be divided by earning points in a quiz task. We use a Baron–Ferejohn framework. Our main treatment variable is the majority required to pass a proposal. Under unanimity rule, all proposals and agreements constitute convex combinations of the equal split and a division that is proportional to points earned in the productive task. Contrary to our predictions, this pattern largely persists under majority rule. In sharp contrast to prior experiments in which an exogenous surplus is divided using majority rule, few subjects attempt to build minimum winning coalitions in the presence of claims from production.     

The Diffusion of Cricket to America: A Figurational Sociological Examination

Abstract  This paper examines the historical development of cricket in America and seeks to explain why, despite having a significant initial impact, the game ultimately became culturally marginal. It is argued that class and cricketing relations in England in the mid-nineteenth century had a significant and hitherto unacknowledged impact on the diffusion of the game to America, and that this unplanned social process can only be understood in the light of the specific interdependencies between the British and Anglo-Americans, between upper and lower class English immigrants, and between English immigrants and "Native White Americans". Correlatively, this analysis spreads new light on the establishment of baseball as America's national game, illustrating a greater level of dependence on the English and English sport than is traditionally attributed.     

Why do some Irish drink so much? Family, historical and regional effects on students’ alcohol consumption and subjective normative thresholds

This paper studies determinants of drinking behavior and formation of subjective thresholds of acceptable drinking behavior using a sample of students in a major Irish University. We find evidence of strong associations between amounts of alcohol students consume and drinking of their fathers and older siblings. In contrast, we find little evidence of impacts of other non-drinking aspects of family background on students’ drinking. Parental and older sibling drinking appears to affect subjective attitudes of students towards what constitutes problem drinking behavior. We investigated historical origins of drinking behavior including the role of the Church, English cultural influences, the importance of the brewery and distilling industry, and the influence of weather. We find relatively strong influences of the Catholic Church and English colonial settlement patterns on Irish drinking patterns but little influence of Irish weather. Historical licensing restrictions on the number of pubs and off-license establishments also appear to matter.     

The Irish brawn drain: English League clubs and Irish footballers, 1946-1995

This paper draws on world systems and resource dependency theories to show how the changing recruitment practices of English League clubs have deepened the brawn drain from Irish football, thereby compounding its underdevelopment. An analysis of the origins, method of recruitment and destinations of Irish players (North and South) who appeared in the English League between 1946 and 1995 shows that English clubs imported large numbers of Irish players throughout the second half of the twentieth century. However, it was the inclusion of Irish teenagers within the youth policies of the largest clubs in the period after the 1970s that marked a break from the traditional pattern of buyer-supplier relations. Instead of continuing to purchase players who had established reputations within the Irish leagues, English clubs began to hire the most promising schoolboys before they joined Irish sides. As this practice spread, it eventually eliminated a valuable source of income: the selling of players to English clubs. Despite this development it would, however, be inappropriate to view the relationship between the Irish and English football industries as a simple zero sum game as Irish clubs benefit from employing highly trained young players who return home after failing to establish careers in England.     

Scoring rule voting games and dominance solvability

This article studies the dominance solvability (by iterated deletion of weakly dominated strategies) of general scoring rule voting games when there are three alternatives. The scoring rules we study include Plurality rule, Approval voting, Borda rule, and Relative Utilitarianism. We provide sufficient conditions for dominance solvability of general scoring rule voting games. The sufficient conditions that we provide for dominance solvability are in terms of one statistic of the game: sufficient agreement on the best alternative or on the worst alternative. We also show that the solutions coincide with the set of Condorcet Winners whenever the sufficient conditions for dominance solvability are satisfied. Approval Voting performs the best in terms of our criteria.     

An arbitration game and the egalitarian bargaining solution

We analyze a simple arbitration procedure which is a multi-stage variant of Nash's demand game. In the absence of discounting, all Nash equilibria of the game yield the egalitarian solution in the first stage. The crucial feature of our arbitration procedure is that, in the case of incompatible demands, the game is allowed to continue and the player who demands the higher gain over the disagreement point is penalized by restricting her or his feasible demands in the following stage. Suitable modifications of the arbitration game yield the lexicographic extension of the egalitarian solution, resp. the proportional solutions. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C72, C78.Financial support through grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of Waterloo is gratefully acknowledged. Earlier versions of the paper were presented at McMaster University and Brock University. The authors thank Nejat Anbarci, Michele Piccione, Venkatraman Sadanand, an editor, and the referees for their useful comments.     

Strongly consistent game forms

This paper characterizes strongly consistent game forms in terms of power structure and cardinality (i.e. the number of persons, alternatives or strategies). There are three main new results in this paper. First, I give a necessary condition for a game form to be strongly consistent; it is also sufficient in several cases. Second, from the view point of informational requirements and based on the first result, I give a sharp lower bound on the cardinality of each agent's strategy space, for a game form to be strongly consistent and individually rational. Third, I show that the unanimous rule is the unique game form that attains this lower bound for strong implementation of the individually rational Pareto correspondence.     

On enforcing socially best alternatives of binary group decision rules

We consider a large class of group decision rules based on pairwise comparisons. We show that if a socially best alternative is defined by the group decision rule, then one can devise a game form such that at least one such alternative can be realized under the appropriate notion of equilibrium.We are extremely grateful to G. Chichilinsky, P. Coughlin and an anonymous referee for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper     

Enough is Enough: Race,Cricket and Protest in the UK

Abstract

This piece considers ethnicity in sport from the perspective of grass roots efforts to confront racism within the quintessentially English game of cricket. Cricket has a long history of discrimination, originally predicated on the basis of class, although recent events have very publicly raised issues of race and national identity. This piece explores how and why cricket became a positive focal point for successful protest against the apartheid regime of South Africa and proceeds to trace the current expression of racism within English cricket. By contrasting the anti-racist campaigns of the late 1960s and early 1970s with a currently emerging movement, we will show that legislative change in the UK has radically altered the ability to effectively demonstrate and campaign on such causes.     

A characterization of the Walras rule

This paper has three purposes. First, we refine the characterization of the Walras rule proposed by Nagahisa (JET 1991) over a more natural and simple domain than the one he employed. We show that the Walras rule is the only social choice rule defined over the domain and satisfying Individual Rationality, Pareto Efficiency, and Local Independence. Second, assuming endowments to be collectively owned, we show that the Walras rule operated from equal division is the only social choice rule satisfying No Envy, Pareto Efficiency, and Local Independence. Third, we show that for every social choice rule satisfying Individual Rationality and Pareto Efficiency, Local Independence is equivalent to a condition of Nash implementation with a game form satisfying convexity.This article is a revised version of Toyama University Working Paper No. 141. We are grateful to Professors William Thomson, Shinsuke Nakamura, Tomoichi Shinotsuka and two anonymous referees for their detailed comments. Nagahisa is grateful for hospitality of the economics department of the University of Rochester.     

The equivalence of the cost share equilibria and the core of a voting game in a public goods economy

We consider a social situation where individuals choose one or some alternative(s) from a set of feasible alternatives. When one alternative is socially chosen, each individual must share the cost for it according to an exogenously given sharing rule. Individuals are allowed to collude among themselves through money transfers. As the mechanism of choosing a social alternative, we consider the cost share equilibrium and a voting game. The cost share equilibrium is an allocation where each individual maximizes his/her utility independently and where unanimity is still maintained. We will show the equivalence between the set of all equilibrium allocations and the core of the voting game with compensation.I would like to thank Professors Mamoru Kaneko, Kotaro Suzumura, William Thomson, Mikio Nakayama, Hiroo Sasaki, Mr. Ken-ichi Shimomura and anonymous referees for their many useful suggestions and comments. I also acknowledge grammatical suggestions of Mr. Ronald M. Siani.     

Choosing an electoral rule: Values and self-interest in the lab

We study the choice of multi-person bargaining protocols in the context of politics. In politics, citizens are increasingly involved in the design of democratic rules, for instance via referendums. If they support the rule that best serves their self-interest, the outcome inevitably advantages the largest group. In this paper, we challenge this pessimistic view with an original lab experiment, in which 252 subjects participated. In the first stage, these subjects experience elections under plurality and approval voting. In the second stage, they decide which rule they want to use for extra elections. We find that egalitarian values that subjects hold outside of the lab shape their choice of electoral rule in the second stage when a rule led to a fairer distribution of payoffs compared to the other one in the first stage. The implication is that people have consistent ‘value-driven preferences’ for decision rules.     

Black slaves and English liberty: A re‐examination of racial slavery in England

Blacks in eighteenth‐century England were caught in a half‐way stage between colonial slavery and English domestic servitude, and out of the ambiguities of their position they were able to alter their status. Consequently slavery came to an end in England between the 1760s and the 1790s, not from the Somerset Case in 1772, nor from the Act of Parliament in 1833, but from the escape of the slaves themselves. Certain institutional elements, namely the traditions of household servitude, a popular libertarian political culture, and the ideology of the rule of law, provided a climate conducive to black resistance. Nonetheless, the initiative for ending slavery, the force which brought the institutional elements into play, came from individual members of the black community.     

The Economic Adjustment of Recently Arrived Bosnian,Afghan and Iraqi Refugees in Sydney,Australia1

Research on the early settlement experience of refugees from Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan is absent, both in Australia and overseas. The current study, based on questionnaire results and the application of SPSS results, explores the impact that pre‐migration and post‐arrival experiences have on the initial post‐arrival economic adjustment in Sydney, Australia of recently arrived refugees from these three countries. Guided by a summary of previous findings and surveyed results of key service providers in Sydney, two propositions based on pre‐migration and post‐migration background variables have been developed and tested with mixed results. As expected, there was a significant relationship between English language competency and the likelihood of being gainfully employed. However, there was, for example, no significant association between current employment status and the time spent in detention camp or the extent of negative exit conditions experienced, and there were no significant differences in employment outcomes for those with or without qualifications. This study concludes with a number of recommendations, in particular, the need for early intervention with adequate English language tuition, employment skills training and career counseling which could greatly assist humanitarian entrants in finding employment and reducing welfare dependence.     

The English State and the 'Celtic' Peoples 1100–1400

Abstract The Medieval English state had been studied by historians largely on its own terms and from its own records, enriched by an occasional reference to continental comparisons and contrasts. This will no doubt remain the primary approach; but it can be usefully supplemented by also looking at the English state through its impact on other 'Celtic' countries in the rest of Britain and Ireland which it brought, either permanently or temporarily, within the ambit of its power. English rule in Wales, Ireland and, briefly, Scotland can thereby serve as a mirror in which one may see refracted some of the essential qualities and mentalités of the English state itself—notably its increasingly self-consiously English character in terms of its own identity and institutions and the growing assumption that there should be a good measure of governmental uniformity and bureaucratic answerability in the lands which it had annexed. English rule in the 'Celtic' countries also brings into sharp focus how dependent the medieval English state was for its operation on an effective relationship between state and society; the failure to replicate that relationship substantially in Wales and Ireland showed that there was more to successful political integration than military might and governmental uniformity.     

CAN SUBGAME PERFECT EQUILIBRIUM THREATS FOSTER COOPERATION? AN EXPERIMENTAL TEST OF FINITE‐HORIZON FOLK THEOREMS

This paper considers extended prisoners' dilemma games in which a second pure strategy equilibrium in the stage game allows for mutual cooperation in all but the last round of the finitely repeated game as an equilibrium outcome. We distinguish a strict and a weak extension of the prisoners' dilemma game in a long and a short horizon treatment. A comparison with the corresponding finitely repeated prisoners' dilemma games shows that the strict additional equilibrium increases cooperation rates while the weak does not. This result is robust to the variation of the time horizon. (JEL C73, C91)