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Decision Costs in Coalition Formation*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Charles R. Adrian  and
Charles Press
Charles R. Adrian
Affiliation:
University of California, Riverside
Charles Press
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
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Extract

Choices made in coalition formation are costly to participants, complex, and difficult to measure with precision because observable coalitions are multi-person, non-zero-sum games. At least eight decision costs are included in the process. The purpose of this paper is to identify them and to examine their usefulness in explaining coalition formation. Decisions include: (1) information costs, (2) responsibility costs, (3) intergame costs, (4) costs of division of payoffs, (5) dissonance costs (6) inertia costs, (7) time costs, and (8) persuasion costs.

Coalition building is an essential aspect of decision making within any political system. Whether one is studying the behavior of a municipal planning commission, a committee or sub-committee of a legislative body, the United Nations Security Council, or any other decision-making institution in which more than one person is involved in reaching a decision, the essential problem is often one of establishing a winning coalition within the entire group membership. A winning coalition is any portion of the group that can decide to do or not to do something that is on the agenda of the group and over which it has competent authority. The requirements of what constitutes a winning coalition are determined by the formal and informal rules of the game. Most commonly, one of the rules is that a winning coalition must consist of one-half the members of the group plus one and this assumption is made for purposes of this paper. The size of the coalition needed is important for individual and coalition strategies, but it is not important conceptually. That is, the problems involved in securing a winning coalition on the United States Supreme Court when only four votes are needed in order to agree to hear a case affects the strategy of the members of the court, but is of no theoretical importance to coalition formation.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 62 , Issue 2 , June 1968 , pp. 556 - 563
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1968

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Footnotes

*

We wish to thank Paul Dawson, Susan B. Hannah, and James Ozinga, all former students in our “choice theory” seminar at Michigan State University, for their critical comments on this article.

References

1 For empirical studies tending to support this principle, see Collins, Barry E. and Guetzkow, Harold, A Social Psychology of Group Processes for Decision-Making (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1964), esp. chap. 9Google Scholar; and Golembiewski, Robert T., The Small Group (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), esp. pp. 144–170.Google Scholar

2 For a supporting study, see Slater, Philip E., “Contrasting Correlates of Group Size,” Sociometry, 21 (1958), 129–139.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Vidich, A. J. and Bensman, Joseph, Small Town in Mass Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), p. 110.Google Scholar

4 McDonald, Jean, “The Theory of Political Coalitions as Applied to the Ingham County Board of Supervisors,” a seminar paper submitted to the authors, Michigan State University, 03, 1966.Google Scholar

5 Riker, William H., The Theory of Political Coalitions (New Haven: Yale University Press 1962).Google Scholar

6 In a zero-sum game, what one player or coalition of players gains, the others lose. The formula is: 1 – (a+b+…x) = 0.

7 Side payments are payments made by players as inducements for other players to join with them in coalition.

8 Downs, Anthony, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1953).Google Scholar

9 L. S. Shapley and Martin Shubik, “A Method for Evaluating the Distribution of Power in a Committee System,” this Review, 48 (1954), 787–792.

10 The theoretical statement is found in Long, Norton E., “The Local Community as an Ecology of Games,” American Journal of Sociology, 64 (1958), 251–261 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; some empirical testing is reported in Smith, Paul A., “The Games of Community Politics,” Midwest Journal of Political Science, 9 (1965), 37–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Kaplan, Morton, System and Process in International Politics (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1957).Google Scholar

12 Olson, Mancur Jr., The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965).Google Scholar

13 Gamson, William A., “Coalition Formation at Presidential Nominating Conventions,” American Journal of Sociology, 68 (1962), 157–171.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Barber, James D., Power in Committees (Chicago: Rand MeNally & Company, 1966), pp. 62–66.Google Scholar

15 Schubert, Glendon A., Quantitative Analysis of Judicial Behavior (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1959).Google Scholar

16 Schelling, Thomas C., The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960).Google Scholar

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