How democracy resolves conflict in difficult games

Steven J. Brams and D. Marc Kilgour

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Democracy resolves conflicts in difficult games like Prisoners’ Dilemma and Chicken by stabilizing their cooperative outcomes. It does so by transforming these games into games in which voters are presented with a choice between a cooperative outcome and a Pareto-inferior noncooperative outcome. In the transformed game, it is always rational for voters to vote for the cooperative outcome, because cooperation is a weakly dominant strategy independent of the decision rule and the number of voters who choose it. Such games are illustrated by 2-person and n-person public-goods games, in which it is optimal to be a free rider, and a biblical story from the book of Exodus.

Keywords: Democracy; voting; social choice; public goods; game theory; Prisoners' Dilemma; Bible (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D7 D6 C72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-gth, nep-hpe, nep-pbe and nep-soc
Date: 2008-10
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Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:12751

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