Friday, January 27, 2012

Euro-Crisis, Bargaining, and Unpredictability

A good post in The Monkey Cage by political scientist Henry Farrel who compares the  Cuban crisis competition in risk taking and the current euro crisis with the help of Nobel Prize winner Thomas Schelling’s analysis.

The risk of one actor going too far in the current game of chicken and thus precipitating breakdown by accident “is all the higher given the importance of market reactions in determining success or failure, and the inability to predict with even the faintest degree of confidence how markets might react to this or that move (it is clear from previous iterations of this game that the key political actors’ ability to model market reactions to their proposals is … limited).”

I came to a similar conclusion by a different reasoning in my book on the topic: there are so many different combinations of national strategies, and conflicting interests, in this oligopolistic game that predictability of the issue is nil. The only conclusion that seems to me reasonably likely is that the outcome will not be consensual. It will be arrived at by acute confrontation and partial or total breakdown, not by a new unanimous agreement.

Read the whole post here.

No comments: