ABSTRACT
The chapters in this book address ways that parties in a conflict manage the trajectories of disputes. We approach this problem by examining the constraints and payoffs governing the conflict. From the 1950s through the 1980s, many conflict experiments examined the trajectories of conflict associated with the payoff matrices in mixed motive games. Like many real-world conflicts the fundamental issue when distributing rewards in games often involves perceptions of justice and exploitation. These qualities of game-playing offer many insights into conflict, as individuals often find themselves in social contexts where personal advantages are sought at the expense of others’ interests. These situations might involve accumulating rewards (e.g., prisoner’s dilemma; trucking games), acting in the public interest (e.g., a public goods dilemma), or distributing limited commodities (e.g., a resource dilemma; ocean mining games).
