ABSTRACT
A coalition consists of two or more persons, groups, institutions, or nations that band together to achieve their common objectives against the opposition of a competing party or parties. The importance of coalition behavior can be discerned from perusal of history textbooks, chock-full of stories and legends about foreign intrigues and political machinations that shaped the fate of nations. Coalition behavior involves the formation of groups whose intention is to use mutual resources to accomplish some common goal in a mixed-motive situation. The resources that can be pooled include not only material ones, such as money, but also personal ones, such as expertise, status, or attraction. Most structural theories generate predictions about which coalitions will form on the basis of the precoalition distribution of resources in the group. An overall equalizing process appears at face value to be contradictory to minimum resource theory, since payoff equalization implies that subjects are not attending to the resources arbitrarily distributed by the experimenter.
