In the much-studied Centipede Game, which resembles the Iterated Prisoners' Dilemma, two players successively choose between (1) cooperating, by continuing play, or (2) defecting and terminating play. The subgame-perfect Nash equilibrium implies that play terminates on the first move, even...

Many game-theoretic analyses of deterrence confirm the commonsense view that what determines whether a defender can effectively deter a challenger from an unwanted action is (1) the challenger’s perception of the level of punishment that the defender will be able to impose on the challenger...

It is well-known that non-cooperative and cooperative game theory may yield different solutions to games. These differences are particularly dramatic in the case of truels, or three-person duels, in which the players may fire sequentially or simultaneously, and the games may be one-round or...

Players are assumed to rank each other as coalition partners. Two processes of coalition formation are defined and illustrated: i) Fallback (FB): Players seek coalition partners by descending lower and lower in their preference rankings until some majority coalition, all of whose members...

Assume that voters must choose between voting yes (Y) and voting no (N) on three propositions on a referendum. If the winning combination is NYY on the first, second, and third propositions, respectively, the paradox of multiple elections is that NYY can receive the fewest votes of the 23 = 8...

A theoretical analysis of the probability of nuclear war is developed that assumes a starting probability and an annual reduction factor. Whatever the starting probability is, a constant reduction factor leads to an eventual probability that is less than 1, whereas the eventual probability goes...

Ordinally single-peaked preferences are distinguished from cardinally single-peaked preferences, in which all players have a similar perception of distances in some one-dimensional ordering. While ordinal single-peakedness can lead to disconnected coalitions that have a ‘hole’ in...

In U.S. presidential elections, voters in noncompetitive states seem not to count—and so have zero voting power, according to the Banzhaf and other voting-power indices—because they cannot influence the outcome in their states. But because the electoral votes of these states are essential to...