ABSTRACT
The ten papers included in this section offer a representative picture of the work currently being done dealing with descriptive aspects of the collective decision problem. The first four papers by Vinacke, Lieberman, Riker, and Willis all deal with problems of coalition formation, which is a central process of collective decision making. Vinacke's paper deals with the effect of the size of the group on coalition behavior. Lieberman's paper describes the first study in which coalitions were manipulated experimentally; coalitions were formed and broken by varying the payoff function, or rewards, to the subjects. Riker examines coalition formation in a three-person, non-zero-sum game, but concentrates his analysis on the effect of informal rules on behavior. “Informal rules are those which describe the game as it is brought out of the eternal world of mathematics into the temporal world of actual play. In general, informal rules are those necessay for play but not necessary to calculate the solution.” (Riker p. 116). Willis examines coalition formation in inessential games, situations where the total payment to the set of players is exactly the same as the sum of the payments to all the individual players, and so there is little incentive for the players to form coalitions. Such situations are then interesting because they offer situations in which a number of behavioral or “social man” hypotheses may be tested.
