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Contractarianism with a Human Face reinterprets the social contract, not as a model to generate a unique set of rules of justice, but as a dynamic process for making comparative institutional evaluations. An institutional reorientation allows contractarians to abandon the untenable assumption of a homogeneous model of agency (be it austere rational choice or Rawlsian reasonableness), replacing it with diverse agents living under institutions all can rationally endorse, and to which they have different reasons to comply. Contractarianism With a Human Face is a contractarian theory that differs from all other contractarian theories because it rejects the search for a unique answer to the question of what is justice. It does not flee from diversity, but instead finds new solutions to old problems through broadening the contractual model and the agents that make it up. This version of contractarianism has a human face in the sense that it starts from the diversity, disorder, and complexity of human life and seeks to find rules that we can all live under. Not by eliminating that diversity, but by embracing it. In so doing, however, it fundamentally changes the shape of contractarian theory. By rejecting the search for a unique "solution" to what rules of justice are justified, Contractarianism With a Human Face becomes a project of evaluating contingent and evolving institutions and constitutional rules. Rationality and justice are reconciled, at least partially, though human history.

War is an inefficient outcome and therefore states ought to prefer to bargain over areas of conflict instead of fighting. However, in the anarchy of international relations there is no actor with a monopoly of power to enforce contracts between states. States then face a commitment problem when bargaining to prevent war. This dissertation explores three models where this commitment problem can lead to war. The first chapter presents a model that allows for shifts in the distribution of power which play out over an arbitrary number of time periods. This leads to a sufficient condition that implies war under a broader set of conditions than previously shown in the literature. This condition implies that preventive war may be caused by relatively slow, but persistent shifts in the distribution of power. As theorized in power transition theory, differential rates of economic growth can potentially cause war under this mechanism. Relaxing the unitary actor assumption of the first chapter, the second chapter analyzes how the domestic institutional structure of countries affects the likelihood of war. We model institutional divergence by comparing an infinitely lived dictatorship to a democracy with a replaceable leader and allow a range of leader incentives within these institutional frameworks. We show that dictators, even welfare maximizing ones, may lead to war if the initial distribution of resources is highly imbalanced whereas a democracy with a forward looking electorate is always peaceful. Yet when a democratic electorate is myopic, preventive war may result. Political parties act as a mechanism to prevent this outcome. In the third chapter, I investigate adding a third actor to the bargaining model of war. In a static setting, the model uses a notion of cooperative stability to predict balancing and bandwagoning behavior in alliance formation. When extended to a dynamic setting, changes to the system that result in alliance shifting may cause war. Additionally, alliance formation need not correspond to the static solutions, suggesting that the dynamics of power are as important as the distribution of power in alliance formation. / text

The Swedish Armed Forces tend to ask themselves if it is sufficiently multinational interoperablefor participation in international operations. An equally valid question today should be whether theSwedish Armed Forces are sufficiently nationally / internally interoperable, between their branchesof service, to be able to conduct independent operations based on the joint warfare theory.The lack of ability to joint warfare in the armed forces in general and the Swedish Armed Forcesspecially constitutes the essay´s fundamental problem. By using Codners and Sjöbloms custominteroperability theory, the Swedish Armed Forces documents were analyzed to highlight anyweaknesses related to joint warfare and national interoperability between Ground and Air Forces.The survey shows weaknesses linked to the custom theory and Swedish Armed Forces governingdocuments. The ability of a national interoperability is limited between Ground and Air Forcestoday, mostly because of weaknesses in the Swedish Armed Forces strategic concept which doesnot describe the importance of joint warfare at all levels sufficiently. This leads to deficienciesreflected in doctrines, regulations, technology, techniques and exercises. Lack of common documents,techniques, methods and exercises in turn affects armed services understanding of theirdifferent backgrounds and unique perspectives. The result will therefore be low national interoperabilityamong the armed services.

abstract: I study split-pie bargaining problems between two agents. In chapter two, the types of both agents determine the value of outside options -- I refer to these as interdependent outside options. Since a direct mechanism stipulates outcomes as functions of agents' types, a player can update beliefs about another player’s type upon receiving a recommended outcome. I term this phenomenon as information leakage. I discuss binding arbitration, where players must stay with a recommended outcome, and non-binding arbitration, where players are not obliged to stay with an allocation. The total pie is reduced if the outcome is an outside option. With respect to efficiency, I derive a necessary and sufficient condition for first best mechanisms. These are mechanisms that assign zero probability to outside options for every report received. The condition describes balanced forces in conflict (outside options) and is the same in the cases of binding and non-binding arbitration. I also show a strong link between conflict and information: when conflict exists, information leakage occurs. Hence, non-binding arbitration may seem more restrictive than binding arbitration. To analyze why this is the case, I solve for second best mechanisms with binding arbitration and find a condition under which they can be implemented under non-binding arbitration. Thus, I show that non-binding arbitration can be as effective as binding arbitration in terms of efficiency. I also examine whether the equivalence between binding and non-binding arbitration can cease to hold, and provide analysis of why this happens. In chapter three, the bargaining problem entails no uncertainty but rather envy. Players can feel envy about the allocation of the other player. The Nash Bargaining solution is obtained in this context and some comparative statics are shown. The introduction of envy makes the more envious party a tougher negotiator. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Economics 2020

Why do wars happen, and what do societies fight over? Why are international relations sometimes fearful and aggressive and other times harmonious? I show that these questions can be fruitfully explored by importing some basic economic theory into the existing bargaining theory of war. A separate essay analyzes the interactions between the United States and countries that may be pursuing nuclear weapons. "Costly Peace: A New Rationalist Explanation for War" posits a new explanation for war: sometimes peace is more costly (in the sense of leaving both sides worse off in expectation) than war. This means that some wars improve overall welfare relative to peace. I develop models for three common sources of costly peace tailored to particular wars and analyze them to expose the common underlying logic for war. The costs of: arming explain the Iraq War; imposition explain the civil conflicts within Iraq after the earlier Gulf War; and predation explain the American War of Independence. "The Modern Economic Peace" develops a theory of the origins of international disputes, in which the economic conflict of interests between two states is determined by the benefits and costs of transferring wealth from one state's economy to the other's. Whether such a transfer happens depends on the military situation between the two states and also the characteristics of their economies and governments. Nations with sensitive, integrated ("modern") economies of comparable size and representative governments have little to fight over. This might explain not only the puzzling comity of the West, but also long-run global patterns in organized violence, economic liberalization, and democratization. "A Model of Arms Proliferation and Prevention" is co-authored with Muhammet Bas. We develop a formal model of bargaining between two states, where one can invest in developing nuclear weapons and the other imperfectly observes its efforts and progress over time, and use it to analyze the occurrence of proliferation and war, the viability of non-proliferation agreements, and the role of intelligence-gathering and estimates. The model explains some of the complex phenomena that occur in these interactions, such as mistaken wars, cyclical crises, and the failure of non-proliferation deals. / Government

The first chapter reports experiments with payoff-equivalent public good and common pool games. Behavior of high-caste and low-caste Indian villagers is compared with behavior of American students in terms of economic surplus foregone or destroyed by failure of cooperation in the public good and common pool games. When information about caste is withheld no significant difference is observed in the efficiency of play between villagers and student subjects at American universities for both the public good game and the payoff-equivalent common pool game. Providing caste information leads to: (i) the lowest level of efficiency when low-caste first movers interact with a low-caste second mover, and (ii) the highest levels of efficiency when high-caste first movers engage with a high-caste second mover. Cross-caste play generates intermediate levels of efficiency. In my second chapter I examine competition and cooperation across genders and castes in India and compare the data with incentivized laboratory experiments across genders and races in the US. High-caste males (India) and White males (U.S.) choose to compete the most and are universally cooperative. In India females compete more and cooperate less when they are paired with other females but not with males. The level of cooperation among the females of either race (US) is lower than that of the White males but is insignificantly different from the level of cooperation among the African American males. In my third chapter I conducted artifactual field experiments in rural India with variations of dictator and ultimatum games. Eight treatments are played: in four we provide information that the other player is the spouse and in the remaining four variations spouse information is not provided. When subjects are unaware of playing with their spouses, they choose to keep the dictator role for themselves or not empower the other player. Male spouses make higher offers in general relative to female spouses. The divisions in these games (no spouse information) are far less equitable than in dictator games with student subjects. We find more concern for procedural fairness when subjects know they are playing with their spouses than when they do not have this information.

Across four self-contained essays, this dissertation seeks to identify which features make international organizations (IOs) effective peacemakers in modern civil wars. The first essay introduces an original dataset on the institutional design of 21 peace-brokering IOs between 1945 and 2010. The second essay contains a statistical study of 122 IO civil war mediation episodes, examining how variation in institutional design affects outcomes. The third essay presents an in-depth case study, comparing interventions by the Arab League and the United Nations in Syria in 2011 and 2012. The fourth essay is a statistical examination of how IO member state biases influence mediation effectiveness. Overall, this dissertation demonstrates that the performance of peace-brokering IOs cannot be accurately evaluated without taking institutional variation into account. IOs display considerable heterogeneity in de­sign and capabili­ties and this variation has implications for the nature and effectiveness of IO interventions. Quantitative evidence reveals that IOs with strongly centralized instruments for supporting mediation and, in particular, peacekeeping operations are more likely to end civil wars. Qualitative evidence shows that IOs with such capabilities can engage in interventions of greater scope and credibility, enhancing their ability to shape the calculations of civil war disputants. Combined, the studies suggest that although institutional capabilities are necessary for sustained intervention effectiveness, they are conditioned on other organizational attributes. IOs with high preference homogeneity can signal intervention durability, giving them an edge over IOs with divided memberships. IOs that contain member states that have pro­vided direct support to civil war disputants outperform IOs that lack such member states. / <p>This dissertation consists of four self-contained essays dealing with different aspects of conflict management by international organizations.</p><p>Essay 4 previously appeared in 2014 as “Leanings and dealings: Exploring bias and trade leverage in civil war mediation by international organizations” (<em>International Negotiation, 19</em>(2), 315–342).</p>

中美雙邊關系的外交議題，在八○年代前后有重大的變革。兩國關系因長期貿易順差 使外交重心由戰略利益轉向經濟利益，兩國自１９８５年起的密集貿易談判充分凸顯 出雙邊關系的這種轉變。 中美貿易談判就表面看，是兩國貿易長期順差導致的結果，但就新興工業國家角度看 ( NICS) ，卻微妙的反映出體系中新興勢力的發展趨勢，即新興工業國家經長期發展 后，其經濟實力已浮現為世界貿易市場的重要競爭者，而GATT的經貿體制帶來不穩定 的因素，使得美國經貿失衡的困境更為嚴重難解。 因此，中美經貿談判可說是美國與其它新興國家談判的一環。這些NICS在國際體系中 權力資源及地位都不如美國，故引發本文動機，即「弱國如何在強權社會中生存」。 其假設為：在強與弱的談判中，權力資源屬于弱勢國家，如何藉談判策略來彌補其權 力結構的限制。 就此假設我們在第二章的文獻探討中，分別以國家有效資源及依賴受損度概念分析國 家權力與談判結果的關聯；及以博奕理論和磋商理論(bargaining theory) 探討不對 稱性談判的策略運用。 在第三章中以臺灣在外交、軍事、經濟上的權力資源，分析臺灣由依賴走向互賴之際 ，權力的增加是否可增加兩國間利益交換的機會。 第四章中的臺灣談判策略分析及第五章的結論都是針對中美在1985∼1990年就個案談 判雙方策略顯現在經貿政策的運用、利益團體的游說，以及結盟奧援等做法的分析。 本文焦點放在以「權力－策略」觀點，分析不對稱談判中弱者如何求生存？以及弱勢 國家如何以策略縮小彼此差距，以打破「權力決定談判結果」的模式，從而為中美經 貿談判的有關研究中，補充這方面的學術空白。

The purpose of information acquisition for data and information fusion is to provide relevant and timely information. The acquired information is integrated (or fused) to estimate the state of some environment. The success of information acquisition can be measured in the quality of the environment state estimates generated by the data and information fusion process. In this thesis, we introduce and set out to characterise the concept of large-scale information acquisition. Our interest in this subject is justified both by the identified lack of research on a holistic view on data and information fusion, and the proliferation of networked sensors which promises to enable handy access to a multitude of information sources. We identify a number of properties that could be considered in the context of large-scale information acquisition. The sensors used could be large in number, heterogeneous, complex, and distributed. Also, algorithms for large-scale information acquisition may have to deal with decentralised control and multiple and varying objectives. In the literature, a process that realises information acquisition is frequently denoted sensor management. We, however, introduce the term perception management instead, which encourages an agent perspective on information acquisition. Apart from explictly inviting the wealth of agent theory research into the data and information fusion research, it also highlights that the resource usage of perception management is constrained by the overall control of a system that uses data and information fusion. To address the challenges posed by the concept of large-scale information acquisition, we present a framework which highlights some of its pertinent aspects. We have implemented some important parts of the framework. What becomes evident in our study is the innate complexity of information acquisition for data and information fusion, which suggests approximative solutions. We, furthermore, study one of the possibly most important properties of large-scale information acquisition, decentralised control, in more detail. We propose a recurrent negotiation protocol for (decentralised) multi-agent coordination. Our approach to the negotiations is from an axiomatic bargaining theory perspective; an economics discipline. We identify shortcomings of the most commonly applied bargaining solution and demonstrate in simulations a problem instance where it is inferior to an alternative solution. However, we can not conclude that one of the solutions dominates the other in general. They are both preferable in different situations. We have also implemented the recurrent negotiation protocol on a group of mobile robots. We note some subtle difficulties with transferring bargaining solutions from economics to our computational problem. For instance, the characterising axioms of solutions in bargaining theory are useful to qualitatively compare different solutions, but care has to be taken when translating the solution to algorithms in computer science as some properties might be undesirable, unimportant or risk being lost in the translation. / QC 20100903