Coalition Formation: The Role of Procedure and Policy Flexibility

A spatial model of coalition formation is used together with data from Dutch elections and theoretical instances to study different procedures of coalition formation. The model shows that procedure plays an important role in reaching a coalition agreement and that political parties do not necessarily benefit from being a first-mover. Moreover, it is shown that a decrease in a party’s flexibility can be (dis)advantageous in coalition negotiations. Furthermore, certain power sharing tactics appear not always to lead to an agreement that is in a party’s advantage. The main message put forward is that the procedure of forming a coalition plays a more important role than is usually acknowledged in literature and practice.     

Negotiating a Stable Government: An Application of Bargaining Theory to a Coalition Formation Model

In this paper, we apply bargaining theory to a certain model of coalition formation. The notions of a feasible government and a stable government are central in the model considered. By a government, we mean a pair consisting of a majority coalition and a policy supported by this coalition. The aim of this paper is to establish which stable government should be created if more than one stable government exists or, in case there is no stable one, which feasible government should be formed if more than one feasible government exists. Several bargaining procedures leading to the choice of one stable (or feasible) government are proposed. We define bargaining games in which only parties belonging to at least one stable (or feasible) government bargain over the creation of a government. We consider different bargaining costs. We investigate subgame perfect equilibria of the bargaining games defined. It turns out that the prospects of a party depend on the procedure applied, and on the bargaining costs assumed. We also apply the coalition formation model to the Polish Parliament after the 2001 elections and apply the different bargaining games for the creation of a government to this example.     

A dimensional versus attribute approach for disaggregate choice models

A fundamental issue facing choice modelers is to make a decision on what kind of independent variables to include in a choice model. With survey data, the two immediate options are: actual product attributes or underlying latent dimensions (factor scores). Using behavioral logic we argue that heterogeneity of consumer perceptions of variables and their saliences should be the key items moderating such a decision. We present empirical evidence to support our theory that dimensional (factor score) based models do better in terms of predictions than attribute based models in more heterogeneous populations. Empirical analysis shows that in segments (where consumer heterogeneity is lower) the predictive performance of attribute based models improves relative to the factor score model and may actually have a better predictive fit when the respondents are relatively homogeneous with respect to attribute ratings and saliences.     

Policy Representation of a Parliament: The Case of the German Bundestag 2013 Elections

Since voters are often swayed more by the charisma, personal image and communication skills of the individual candidates standing for election than by the parties’ political manifestos, they may cast votes that are actually in opposition to their policy preferences. Such a type of behavior, known as ‘irrational voting’, results in the election of representatives who do not correspond exactly to the voters’ own views. To illustrate this, we consider the 28 German parties that took part in the 2013 Bundestag (federal) election and compare their positions on 36 topical issues with the results of public opinion polls. Then we construct the party and coalition indices of popularity (the average percentage of the population represented) and universality (frequency in representing a majority). In particular, we find that the 2013 election winner, the conservative union CDU/CSU with their 41.5 % of the votes, was the least representative among the 28 parties considered. The representativeness of the Bundestag is about 50 %, as if the correspondence with the electorate’s preference on every policy issue had been decided by tossing a coin, meaning that the Bundestag’s policy profile is independent of that of the electorate. The next paper, ‘An election method to improve policy representation of a parliament’ (Tangian 2016), suggests a possible way to surmount the problems revealed by our analysis. An alternative election procedure is proposed and hypothetically applied to the 2013 Bundestag, producing a considerable gain in its representativeness.     

The negotiator’s power as enabler and cultural distance as inhibitor in the international alliance formation

We examined how the negotiator’s power, the explorative–exploitative purpose and cultural distance interact in the negotiation for an international business alliance formation. Our participant observation in some several events of negotiation suggests that the executive’s power plays an enabling role in the negotiation for alliance formation. However, cultural distance between the negotiating parties in the international business context hampers the success of the negotiation. In particular, person power supports the explorative alliance purpose. The explorative alliance embodies technical and behavioural uncertainty. On the other hand, position power supports the exploitative alliance purpose. The exploitative alliance purpose more aptly embodies behavioural uncertainty than technical uncertainty does.Cultural distance has a high negative influence on person power and the explorative alliance, and person power and the explorative alliance indicate high uncertainty. In comparison, cultural distance has a negative influence on position power and exploitative alliance, and position power and exploitative alliances indicate low uncertainty. In other words, cultural distance matters more in the person–explorative combination than it does in the position–exploitative combination. The main assumption is that cultural distance has adverse effects on both power and tasks in the negotiation. However, the notions of power and purpose do not influence the effect of national cultural differences.     

Cross-reward effects in a coalition loyalty program: The impact of a point currency devaluation

While single-brand reward programs encourage customers to remain loyal to that one brand, coalition programs encourage customers to be “promiscuous” by offering points redeemable across partner stores. Despite the benefits of this “open relationship” with customers, store managers face uncertainty as to how rewards offered by partners influence transactions at their own stores. We use a model of multi-store purchase incidence and spend to show how the value of points shared among partner stores can explain patterns in customer-level purchases across them. We also allow reward spillovers to be moderated by three measures of store affinity that characterize a coalition’s portfolio: the relative popularity, geographic distance, and overlap in product categories between each pair of stores.For the coalition studied, popularity affinity was the main determinant of the valence of cross-reward effects, both before and after the devaluation. In contrast, category and geographic affinity had a smaller and more heterogenous impact. Through the use of an event where the loyalty program uniformly devalued the entire coalition’s value of reward points, we show that cross-reward effects changed (lessened), leading to larger financial losses for the most popular stores. While we do not observe changes to the composition of the coalition’s portfolio, our results also suggest that the value of a shared reward currency may be driven by the inclusion of smaller partners.     

Class alliances and conflict: An explanation of political transitions in 19th‐century Europe

I develop a model analyzing common interests and conflict among four classes—capitalists, workers, landlords, and peasants in 19th‐century Europe—and show that strong class position, based on a high degree of organization and solidarity, may actually be detrimental to the economic and political advantage of that class. This occurs when a strong class is excluded from a major class coalition via coalition formation processes. The reason is that the weak class, if they enjoy bargaining power over even weaker classes within a coalition, may not want to form a coalition with the strong class. I apply the main results to coalition formation and political transitions in 19th‐century European society.     

Anger in social conflict: Cross-situational comparisons and suggestions for the future

This paper reviews research on the role of anger in conflict. We distinguish between intrapersonal and interpersonal effects of anger, the former referring to the impact of parties’ feelings of anger on their own behavior and the latter referring to the impact of one parties’ anger on the other’s behavior. We further compare the effects of anger across a variety of conflict settings, including negotiation, ultimatum bargaining, prisoner’s dilemma, resource dilemma, and coalition formation. At the intrapersonal level, anger is associated with competition in all conflict settings. In contrast, the interpersonal effects of anger differ across situations, with anger sometimes eliciting cooperation, sometimes eliciting competition, and sometimes having no effect. Based on the research reviewed, we conclude that the interpersonal effects of anger in conflict are determined by the level of interdependence of the parties, their information processing tendencies, and the justifiability of the anger expressions. Preparation of this paper was facilitated by a Veni grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO 451–05–010) awarded to Gerben A. Van Kleef.     

无线传感器网络中DV-Hop定位方法的一种改进策略

原DV-Hop(Distance Vector-Hop)方法的定位步骤可归纳为两步：距离估计与位置计算。其中,距离估计精度对网络拓扑敏感,而位置计算算法对距离估计精度敏感,从而导致方法整体对多样性网络拓扑分布的鲁棒性较差。针对这一问题进行分析与改进,在距离估计阶段提出基于1跳内最近邻信标与其余信标的跳数连接关系独立确定未知节点与各信标间平均跳距的策略,以此改善未知节点与信标之间的距离估计误差;在位置计算阶段提出在原有Lateration算法的基础上增加牛顿迭代法优化步骤,以此提高定位精度。实验结果表明,在相同的网络条件下,与原DV-Hop方法和其他典型改进方法相比,改进策略首先在距离估计阶段提高了距离估计精度,进而在位置计算阶段提高了对距离估计误差的鲁棒性,从而整体上可有效提高全网未知节点的定位精度。     

Equilibrium coalition structures in the presence of foreign direct investment

This paper incorporates foreign direct investment (FDI) into the examination of trading bloc formation with endogenously determined coalition structures. In so doing, we build a three-country model, in which firms serve foreign markets either by exporting or undertaking FDI, and consider a coalition formation game with the Coalition Proof Nash Equilibrium as an equilibrium concept. We find that the equilibrium coalition structure varies upon firms characterization before and after the formation of a trading bloc. As in the literature, when all firms are exporters in the pre- and post-formation, bilateralism can be an equilibrium outcome. However, when trade barriers are not so high as to be trade-prohibitive and the environment is favorable to multinational activities in the pre- or post-formation, only global free trade will prevail as an equilibrium coalition structure.     

A generalized theoretical modelling approach for the assessment of economic-capital under asset market liquidity risk constraints

This paper proposes a concrete theoretical foundation and a new modelling framework that attempts to tackle the issue of market/liquidity risk and economic-capital estimation at a portfolio level by combining two mutual asset market/liquidity risk models. In essence, this study extends research literature related to the assessment of the asset market/liquidity risk by providing a generalized theoretical modelling underpinning that handle, from the same perspective, market and liquidity risks jointly and integrate both risks into a portfolio setting without a commensurate increase of statistical postulations. As such, we argue that market and liquidity risk components are correlated in most cases and can be integrated into one single market/liquidity framework that consists of two interrelated sub-components. The first component is attributed to the impact of adverse price movements and is modelled based on the concept of liquidity-adjusted value-at-risk framework, while the second component focuses on the risk of variation in transactions costs due to the bid-ask spreads and it attempts to measure the likelihood that it will cost more than expected to liquidate the asset position. As such, the model comprises a new approach to contemplating the impact of time-varying volatility of the bid-ask spread and its upshot on the overall asset market/liquidity risk. The modelling framework can be constructive for financial service industries in emerging-economies and particularly in reinforcing rational economic-capital allocation in light of the aftermaths of the sub-prime financial crisis.     

Sharing the value‐at‐risk under distributional ambiguity

This paper considers the problem of risk sharing, where a coalition of homogeneous agents, each bearing a random cost, aggregates their costs, and shares the value‐at‐risk of such a risky position. Due to limited distributional information in practice, the joint distribution of agents' random costs is difficult to acquire. The coalition, being aware of the distributional ambiguity, thus evaluates the worst‐case value‐at‐risk within a commonly agreed ambiguity set of the possible joint distributions. Through the lens of cooperative game theory, we show that this coalitional worst‐case value‐at‐risk is subadditive for the popular ambiguity sets in the distributionally robust optimization literature that are based on (i) convex moments or (ii) Wasserstein distance to some reference distributions. In addition, we propose easy‐to‐compute core allocation schemes to share the worst‐case value‐at‐risk. Our results can be readily extended to sharing the worst‐case conditional value‐at‐risk under distributional ambiguity.     

Multi-Brand Loyalty Cards: A Good Idea

The UK's leading coalition loyalty card scheme was launched at a time when questions were raised regarding the viability of such schemes. Two years into the scheme, it is now appropriate to review the scheme's relationship with its' customers and judge its' success in terms of its ability to influence card holders' behaviour.

To meet the objectives a survey methodology was adopted, and a new questionnaire devised for administration to a sample of coalition loyalty card scheme cardholders. The survey achieved 153 responses from the scheme members.

Findings from the study revealed that coalition loyalty card scheme holders' exhibit weak bonds between the card provider and its customers and that customers display signs of low commitment, low trust and low perceived relational benefits. There is a decisive lack of awareness of many sponsors and this confusion seemed to be leading to the use of coalition loyalty card scheme as a single-brand card. Although usage rates are on a par with other loyalty schemes, a lack of involvement seems apparent; indicating that no considerable increase in share of customer had occurred. This is mainly down to poorly targeted communications and irrelevant reward offerings.

Finally, there was little to suggest that coalition loyalty card scheme are currently having much influence over consumer behaviour, as the bonds between the two parties were not strong enough to encourage this. However, this does not indicate that the current market leader is currently unsuccessful, there is evidence to suggest consumers perceive real benefits in coalition schemes and that there is a willingness to alter their behaviour if the motivation is sufficient. Implications for future research include more specific investigations into the dynamic of the relationship between loyalty schemes and consumers and further research on coalition schemes per se.     

Interactive Multiple‐Criteria Methods for Reaching Pareto Optimal Agreements in Negotiations

The common features of two interactive methods that can be used in multiple-party negotiations over continuous issues are studied. One method is based on finding jointly improving directions to the parties to move along and the other on making constraint proposals to the parties. The history and the related literature on the subject is briefly surveyed in order to position the methods within the field. The basic similarities and differences together with the possibility to use them jointly are studied from the point of view of single negotiation text concept. Potential application areas including facilitation agents in distributed artificial intelligence are suggested.     

Fuzzy Set Based Consensus Schemes for Multicriteria Group Decision making Applied to Strategic Planning

This paper studies three consensus schemes based on fuzzy models for dealing with the input of multiple experts in multicriteria decision making. The consensus schemes are based on different aggregation procedures for constructing a collective decision. In the paper, we propose a methodology that makes use of the three consensus schemes implemented by a coordination mode that creates an efficient manner of exploiting the capabilities of each member of the group in a cooperative work. The applicability and efficiency of the proposed methodology is demonstrated through an application related to strategic planning.     

Credit Support for Export: Robust Evidence from the Czech Republic

The topic of this paper is quite a novel one – it is one of few empirical academic papers dealing with export credit. Moreover, it is the first analysis of this kind which focuses on transition economies. The paper deals with export credit promotion in the Czech Republic. The development and structure of Czech trade and export support is presented first, followed by an econometric analysis of the gravity model of Czech Republic trade. A panel of 160 countries in 1996–2008 is analysed and two gravity models of exports for the Czech Republic are estimated, the static model by fixed effects (LSDV estimator) and the dynamic model by System GMM. Due to ambiguous conclusions we assume that the behaviour of our explanatory variables is not uniform and our data set behaves as a mixture of countries with heterogeneous behaviour. This means that traditional techniques of estimation which include all observations into one model do not give significant results. Thus, we use robust techniques of estimation that solve the problem of heterogeneous patterns in data sets. Out of several possibilities we use the Least Trimmed Squares estimator (LTS) with a leverage point. We show that guarantees are a significant factor that influences positively the volume of exports in the Czech Republic. Moreover, there exist more variables that affect the size of exports in the Czech Republic. Market forces described by GDP, distance, political risk or gross fix capital formation are significant in our econometric model. We find that higher GDP, shorter distance or lower political risk have a positive impact on Czech exports.     

城镇化背景下中国文化产品贸易的影响因素研究

文化建设是城镇化的重要内容,城镇化进程会从供给、需求、交流等方面促进中国文化产品贸易。结合贸易双方城镇化进程、文化产业投入等因素,基于扩展引力模型分析中国文化产品贸易的影响因素,结果表明:对象国城镇化进程、人口数量、人均GDP和信息技术水平对中国文化产品贸易有显著的正向影响,双方的地理距离则对其呈现显著的负向影响,同时,中国的信息技术水平对中国文化产品贸易也具有显著的正向促进作用。     

A Distance-Based Consensus Model with Flexible Choice of Rank-Position Weights

In this paper we propose a preference aggregation procedure for those cases in which the decision-makers express their preferences by means of a ranking of alternatives. Among the most applied methods for this purpose are those inspired by the Borda–Kendall rule, which attach to each alternative an aggregated value of the votes received in the different rank positions, and those based on distance measures between individual and collective preferences, which look for the solution that maximizes the consensus. The main idea here is to integrate these two approaches. Taking into account that the information about the values of weights or utilities assigned to each rank position is imprecise, we propose an evaluation of the alternatives using that vector of weights that minimizes the disagreement between DMs. In order to solve the problem, mixed-integer linear programming models are constructed. Two numerical examples are examined to illustrate the applicability of the proposed procedure.     

Linking Social Issues to Organizational Impact: The Role of Infomediaries and the Infomediary Process

When do organizations decide to ‘adopt’ a given social issue such that they come to acknowledge it in their patterns of action and communication? Traditional answers to this question have focused either on the characteristics of the issue itself, or on the traits of the focal organization. In many cases, however, a firm’s decision to adopt or ignore an issue is not a straightforward function of firm or issue characteristics. Instead, we view issue adoption as a socially constructed process of information exchange between parties that are involved in the emergence and evolution of the issue, mediated by third-party organizations. We refer to this process as the infomediary process and these latter organizations as ‘infomediaries,’ after the information mediation and brokerage roles they play in the social processes linking social issues to organizational impact. We present a concise theoretical model of how infomediaries establish credible linkages between focal organizations and social issues. The thrust of the model is that the infomediation process, rather than the issue or firm characteristics, is what really drives firm-level issue adoption decisions.     

Coalition formation in international monetary policy games

This paper analyses coalition formation in monetary policy coordination games between n countries. We show that some but not all countries may join if the decision to be a member of the coalition is incentive-compatible for the individual country. Positive spillovers of the coalition formation process and the resulting free-rider problem limit the stable coalition size: since the coalition members are bound by the union’s discipline, an outsider can successfully export inflation without fearing that the insiders will try to do the same. These ‘gains from staying out’ arise even in the case of symmetric shocks.