7 - Congruency
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 October 2009
Summary
The enormous potential in mutual benefit (cooperative) strategies will not be tapped – or even understood – until we broaden our perspective beyond the narrow prejudice that we always do best by trying to beat others.
Alfie Kohn, No Contest (Houghton Mifflin, 1986)Unless a community is a total dictatorship or is given to complete anarchy, there will be some form of sociality that is conducive to at least a weak form of agreement-seeking, or congruency. Cooperative societies may be expected to agree to work together, competitive societies may be expected to agree to oppose each other, and mixed-motive societies may be expected to agree to compromises that balance their interests. The procedures used to arrive at these agreements, however, are not determined simply as a function of the preference structure of the decision makers, either for von Neumann–Morgenstern scenarios or for satisficing scenarios. Instead, the procedures often involve some form of negotiation. Negotiation is a deliberative process whereby multiple decision makers can evaluate and share information when they have incentives to strike a mutually acceptable compromise.
In this chapter we first review von Neumann–Morgenstern N-person game theory, which forms the basis of classical negotiation theory. We then describe a new approach to negotiation based on satisficing game theory.
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- Satisficing Games and Decision MakingWith Applications to Engineering and Computer Science, pp. 143 - 168Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003