Soviet-American Dialogue in the Social Sciences Research Workshops on Interdependence Among Nations (1990) / Chapter Skim
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Interdependence in a Crisis Situation: Simulating the Caribbean Crisis (1988)
Interdependence in a Crisis Situation: Simulating the Caribbean Crisis (1988)
Pages 47-52
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From page 47... ...
That is, in flying to elucidate the problem of interdependence in crisis situations, we first turn to concrete historical analysis, specifically, the paradigmatic, well-documented case of the Caribbean crisis of 1962. Second, we join a tradition of counterfactual modeling which allows us to remove an event from its historical context and to ascribe to it certain "coordinates." By changing the coordinates, we may conduct quasi-experimental tests of hypotheses about the event, thereby identifying typical features of crisis situations and explaining them.
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From page 48... ...
Since every action of the participants could be regarded as the outcome of a choice between cooperative and conflictual strategies based on their evaluation of the alternatives, inferring these evaluations from their actions defines a special class of mathematical tasks the inverse problem of conventional game theory, in which the values of the alternatives are given. The flow of events may be represented as multiple plays of a 2x 2 matrix game.
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From page 49... ...
, analysis shows the presence of only one substantially possible variant of the participants' perception of the situation, represented in the matrix below: USSR Cooperation Conflict United States: Cooperation 3,3 2,4 Conflict 4,2 1,1 At the same time, well-known facts and eye-witnesses' accounts indicate that there was one more "peak of certainty" in the course of the crisis just at the moment of maximal aggravation (October 26-27~. Our analysis reveals this peculiarity also: for the segment marked by the October 26 cutting point the program gives two not-very-different matrices, each having a rather substantial likelihood: USSR Cooperation Conflict United States: Cooperation 1,4 3,3 Conflict 4,2 - 2,1 USSR Cooperation Conflict United States: Cooperation 1,3 3,4 Conflict 4,2 2,1 The peaks of certainty are of different natures: the matrices for October 26-27 presuppose conflict escalation on the part of the United States, while for January 7 we see the well-lmown Chicken matrix.
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From page 50... ...
Senate on June 14, 1960; statements on the situation in the Caribbean area at news conferences of September 5 and 13, 1962; a television address to the people on October 22, 1962, and a statement at the news conference of November 22, 1962. Our main research goals were to display Kennedy's perception of the strategic situation before the crisis; to reproduce his perception of the sequence of tactical situations of September-November 1962, in order to shed light on the restructuring of his thinking and to identify trends in its evolution; and to implement (using computer devices at our disposal)
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From page 51... ...
In this study we simulate only one of the subprocesses postulated by the easiest rational decision model, namely, that of a comparative assessment of options available to a decision maker in a concrete situation. We treat a cognitive map as a set of interconnected states of the world, which can be activated to a certain degree.
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From page 52... ...
Political Sciences and the Scientist and Technological Revolution, pp.
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