Farsightedness in Games: Stabilizing Cooperation in International Conflicts

36 Pages Posted: 5 May 2018 Last revised: 14 Dec 2018

See all articles by Steven J. Brams

Steven J. Brams

New York University (NYU) - Wilf Family Department of Politics

Mehmet Ismail

King’s College London - Department of Political Economy

Date Written: April 19, 2018

Abstract

We show that a cooperative outcome—one that is at least next-best for the players—is not a Nash equilibrium (NE) in 19 of the 57 2 x 2 strict ordinal conflict games (33%), including Prisoners’ Dilemma and Chicken. Auspiciously, in 16 of these games (84%), cooperative outcomes are nonmyopic equilibria (NMEs) when the players make farsighted calculations, based on backward induction; in the other three games, credible threats induce cooperation. More generally, in all 2-person and n-person games, if players’ preferences are strict, farsighted calculations stabilize at least one Pareto-optimal NME. We illustrate the choice of NMEs that are not NEs by two cases in international relations: (i) no first use of nuclear weapons, chosen by the protagonists in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and since adopted by some nuclear powers; and (ii) the 2015 agreement between Iran, and a coalition of the United States and other countries, that has forestalled Iran’s possible development of nuclear weapons.

Keywords: Game Theory, Theory of Moves, n-Person Games, International Relations

JEL Classification: C70, F50, D74

Suggested Citation

Brams, Steven and Ismail, Mehmet, Farsightedness in Games: Stabilizing Cooperation in International Conflicts (April 19, 2018). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3165821 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3165821

Steven Brams

New York University (NYU) - Wilf Family Department of Politics ( email )

Dept. of Politics
19 West 4th St., 2nd Fl.
New York, NY 10012
United States
212-998-8510 (Phone)
212-995-4184 (Fax)

HOME PAGE: http://politics.as.nyu.edu/object/stevenbrams.html

Mehmet Ismail (Contact Author)

King’s College London - Department of Political Economy ( email )

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
62
Abstract Views
975
Rank
632,837
PlumX Metrics