Power in American and German multi-chamber legislation is determined either by an inter-institutional or an internal coalition problem of all inter-linked chambers. Hence, the complexity of multi-chamber systems relies on different subgames, different types of decision rules and different types...

Although mediation is one of the most widely used conflict management techniques, not all international conflicts involve mediation. Why do mediators intervene in some conflicts while not in others? Do third parties strategically select cases for mediation? How does their decision to intervene...

Institutions structure incentive environments for strategic actors. What is the effect of a flawed institution - one that is not perfectly predictable - on strategic behavior? This paper focuses on the influence of the judiciary on inter-governmental rivalry in a federation, in particular...

The paper introduces and discusses some of the most important conceptual ideas in game theory by exploring their implicit answer to the question: Who is a player? It will be illustrated that some of the most celebrated results in game theory rely on different notions of a player, global players...

This paper examines a recent debate in the literature on power indices in which classical measures such as the Banzhaf, Shapley-Shubik, and Public Good indices have been criticized on the grounds that they do not take into account player preferences. It has been argued that an index that is...

The aim of this article is to distinguish between strategies in the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma on the basis of their relative performance in a given population set. We first define a natural order on such strategies that disregards isolated disturbances, by using the limit of...

How is negative reciprocity cultivated in an environment of violent conflict? This study investigates how students in the West Bank react to unfair proposals in an ultimatum game. Proposals submitted with Hebrew as compared to Arab handwriting are rejected more often. Israelis must offer 15...

The author develops a new game-theoretic approach, anchored not in Boolean two-valued logic but instead in linguistic fuzzy logic. The latter is characterized by two key features. First, the truth values of logical propositions span a set of linguistic terms such as true, very true, almost...

Storytelling has long been recognized as central to human cognition and communication. Here we explore a more active role of stories in social science research, not merely to illustrate concepts but also to develop new ideas and evaluate hypotheses, for example, in deciding that a research...

This article analyzes the literature on procedural models of European Union politics. We present an overview of the main models of the legislative procedures, with a focus on their relevance to European Union politics and the literature today. We discuss early controversies in the literature and...