Certain voting bodies can be modeled as a simple game where a coalition's winning depends on whether it wins, blocks or loses in two smaller simple games. There are essentially five such ways to combine two proper games into a proper game. The most decisive is the lexicographic rule, where a...

A two-house legislature can often be modelled as a proper simple game whose outcome depends on whether a coalition wins, blocks or loses in two smaller proper simple games. It is shown that there are exactly five ways to combine the smaller games into a larger one. This paper focuses on one of...

Leaders and historians see prestige as important, but international relations theorists have neglected the concept, in part for lack of a clear definition. It is proposed that a party "holds prestige" when group members generally believe that the party has a certain desirable quality, and this...

|When international relations theorists use the concept of risk aversion, they usually cite the economics conception involving concave utility functions. However, concavity is meaningful only when the goal is measurable on an interval scale. International decisions are usually not of this type,...

Many disputes involve conflicts of rights. A common view is that rights cannot really be in conflict so one of those being claimed must be a mistake. This idea leads to extreme outcomes that cut some parties out. Many studies have investigated how to choose a compromise among rights but they...

Two players bid for a dollar on the condition that both the loser and the winner must pay the bids, although only the winner will receive the dollar. Collusion or threats are excluded; bids must be in units of nickels; and a player does not bid in a situation in which bidding and not bidding would...

Crisis instability is the danger of war due to each side's fear that the other is about to attack. An index is defined to measure the degree of instability in a situation and is justified by a set of persuasive criteria that any such measure should satisfy, and also by a set of axioms based in...