Take or Leave? Distribution in Asymmetric One-Off Conflict

Most social scientists' views of conflict and cooperation in society are shaped by very elementary, one-off, two by two symmetric simultaneous move games like prisoner's dilemma, chicken, assurance or stag hunt. We think that this diet of examples leads to biased accounts in particular of distributional conflict, and therefore suggest that asymmetry in payoffs and move structure be taken into account systematically. In this paper a new paradigm of asymmetric games to study basic distributional conflicts is introduced, illustrated numerically and discussed theoretically. The results of exploratory experiments on the empirical side of the matter are also reported