Coalition Formation

Nydegger and Owen look at coalition formation in a circumstance involving allocation of scarce resources among members of a group. Seeking to investigate the role of psychological processes versus the norms of game theory in bargaining for the splitting of money, their study invited groups of two players to exclude or include the third player of their group in the split, and then asked each player to rate (characterize) the others. It was hypothesized that the third player would be excluded in most group cases and that the post-bargaining rating of each player would, in effect, justify that exclusion. However, in the event, third players were more often included. This caused Nydegger and Owen to transform their hypothesis. In other words, they analyzed the results so as to account for the more equitable distribution of money. They concluded that psychological and social norms, including "the complexity of the forces acting on the subjects' behavior" (p.

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l suprlus norm "makes predictions that are too egalitarian" (p. 193). The reason for this view appears to be that it assumes surplus distribution of benefits will tend to be egalitarian, when in fact this is not necessarily the case. The main conclusion that Komorita, et al. derive from these dynamics is that inputs (investments or skills) are important variables where predicting distribution outcomes are concerned, in each theoretical instance: "Inputs are weighted most heavily in equity theory, ar e ignored in equal surplus, and assume an intermediate position in bargaining theory" (1989, p. 194). Further, conditions under which individual investments are a factor of how coalitions will be formed give greater weight to individual competitiveness than do conditions under which team efforts are designed to elicit a distribution of payoffs based on skills involved in implementing such efforts. While each of these studies makes a case for the utility of some coalition theory or other to explain and/or predict how persons will behave in order to achieve a specific goal, none appears to give an adequate account of the vicissitudes of human behavior in the variety of real-world human experience. The fact that the universe of subjects w
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Approximate Word count = 1840
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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