Content area
Full Text
Barriers to conflict resolution. Edited by KENNETH J. ARROW, ROBERT H. MNOOKIN, LEE ROSS, AMOS TVERSKY, AND ROBERT WILSON. New York and London: Norton, 1995. Pp. x, 358. $35.00. ISBN 0-393-03737-1. JEL 96-0054
By understanding games better, people who play them can increase their probability of winning, and people who make the rules can decrease the probability of conflict among players. So game theory is about two things at once: victory and compromise, strategy and conflict resolution. The latter is the special concern of the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation (SCCN). This book collects 15 papers from a SCCN conference on conflict resolution and divides them into four groups. "Social and Psychological Perspectives" contains papers by Lee Ross, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Robyn Dawes and John Orbell, Max Bazerman and Margaret Neale. "Strategic and Analytical Perspectives" contains papers by Robert Wilson, Ariel Rubinstein, Howard Raiffa, and James Sebenius. "Institutional Perspectives" contains papers by Ronald Gilson and Robert Mnookin, Edward Parson and Richard Zeckhauser, Jon Elster, and Kenneth Arrow. The final section, "Contextual Explorations," contains papers by John Dunlop, Lawrence Susskind, and Wolfgang Panofsky.
These contributors, some of whom are intellectual icons in their fields, signal a volume of high quality. The reader will not be disappointed. Although each paper deserves reflection, I cannot comment on all of them. Even the lucid introduction avoids this daunting task. Instead, I will discuss the book's level, tone, and accomplishments.
The contributions are written, with one or two exceptions, for the intelligent consumer of social science. In each paper, the authors introduce technical concepts in ordinary language, provide a gloss on their history and use, and then apply these concepts to policies...