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Policy PointsFaced with urgent threats to human health and well‐being such as climate change, calls among the academic community are getting louder to contribute more effectively to the implementation of the evidence generated by our research into public policy.As interest in knowledge translation (KT) surges, so have a number of anxieties about the field's shortcomings. Our paper is motivated by a call in the literature to render useful advice for those beginning in KT on how to advance impact at a policy level.By integrating knowledge from fields such as political science, moral psychology, and marketing, we suggest that thinking and acting like marketers, lobbyists, movements, and political scientists would help us advance on the quest to bridge the chasm between evidence and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite significant progress in research on the treatment and prevention of psychological, behavioral, and health problems, the translation of this knowledge into population-wide benefit remains limited. This paper reviews the state of America's children and families, highlighting the influence of stressful contextual and social conditions on child and family well-being and the concentration of disadvantage in numerous neighborhoods and communities throughout the nation. It then briefly reviews the progress that has been made in pinpointing policies that can reduce stressful contextual conditions such as poverty, discrimination, and the marketing of unhealthful foods and substances. It also describes numerous family and school interventions that have proven benefit in preventing psychological and behavioral problems as diverse as tobacco, alcohol, and other drug use; depression; antisocial behavior; academic failure; obesity prevention; and early childbearing. We argue that progress in translating existing knowledge into widespread benefit will require a nationwide effort to intervene comprehensively in neighborhoods and communities of concentrated disadvantage. We present a strategic plan for how such an effort could be organized. The first step in this organizing would be the creation of a broad and diverse coalition of organizations concerned with advancing public health and well-being. Such a coalition could increase public support both for the policies needed to focus on these disadvantaged areas and the research needed to incrementally improve our ability to help these areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we apply bargaining theory to a certain model of coalition formation. The notions of a feasible government and a stable government are central in the model considered. By a government, we mean a pair consisting of a majority coalition and a policy supported by this coalition. The aim of this paper is to establish which stable government should be created if more than one stable government exists or, in case there is no stable one, which feasible government should be formed if more than one feasible government exists. Several bargaining procedures leading to the choice of one stable (or feasible) government are proposed. We define bargaining games in which only parties belonging to at least one stable (or feasible) government bargain over the creation of a government. We consider different bargaining costs. We investigate subgame perfect equilibria of the bargaining games defined. It turns out that the prospects of a party depend on the procedure applied, and on the bargaining costs assumed. We also apply the coalition formation model to the Polish Parliament after the 2001 elections and apply the different bargaining games for the creation of a government to this example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of groups and of inequality is often traced to pre-existing differences, exclusionary practices, or resource accumulation processes, but can the emergence of groups and their differential success simply be a feature of the behaviors of a priori equally-capable actors who have mutually adapted? Using a simple model of behavioral co-adaptation among agents whose individual actions construct a common environment, we present evidence that the formation of unequal groups is endemic to co-adaptive processes that endogenously alter the environment; agents tend to separate into two groups, one whose members stop adapting earliest (the in-group), and another comprising agents who continue to adapt (the out-group). Over a wide range of model parameters, members of the in-group are rewarded more on average than members of the out-group. The primary reason is that the in-group is able to have a more profound influence on the environment and mold it to the benefit of its members. This molding capacity proves more beneficial than the persistence of adaptivity, yet, crucially, which agents are able to form a coalition to successfully exert this control is strongly contingent on random aspects of the set of agent behaviors. In this paper, we present the model, relevant definitions, and results. We then discuss its implications for the study of complex adaptive systems generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends a recently proposed model of dynamical interactions between the macro structures of a society to hierarchically ordered societies. The so extended model helps interpreting some social and political phenomena such as coalitions, their hierarchical level and the degree of anarchy on a certain hierarchical level. The surprising property of the underlined model that stability is certain in the constant parameter case strikingly extends to this model. One of the main results of the paper is that the system has a unique equilibrium exactly when there is no anarchy on the highest hierarchical level. These results apply to a study of changes in the equilibria as determined by the changes in the system parameters [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper studies cooperative games with restricted cooperation among players. We define situations in which a priori unions and hypergraphs coexist simultaneously and mutually depend on each other. We call such structures two-layered hypergraphs. Using a two-step approach, we define a value of the games with two-layered hypergraphs. The value is characterized by Owen’s coalitional value of hypergraph-restricted games and in terms of weighted Myerson value. Further, our value is axiomatically characterized by component efficiency and a coalition size normalized balanced contributions property. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this paper we study the restriction, to the class of bargaining problems with coalition structure, of several values which have been proposed on the class of non-transferable utility games with coalition structure. We prove that all of them coincide with the solution independently studied in Chae and Heidhues [Chae, S., Heidhues, P., 2004. A group bargaining solution. Mathematical Social Sciences 48, 37–53] and Vidal-Puga [Vidal-Puga, J.J., 2005a. A bargaining approach to the Owen value and the Nash solution with coalition structure. Economic Theory 25, 679–701]. Several axiomatic characterizations and two non-cooperative mechanisms are proposed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper, we suppose that players join in coalitions and form a coalition configuration, and we provide a generalization of the normalized Banzhaf-Coleman (1965, 1971) index to this framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a new model of multidimensional coalition formation in politics is presented. The model provides an opportunity to analyze a number of different kinds of issues at the same time. A policy space consists of a finite number of independent sub-spaces (policy spaces on certain issues), which can be multidimensional. Any policy sub-space on a certain sub-issue can be either a Euclidean space or (in principle) any other type of set. So, it is possible to include issues which cannot be represented by a Euclidean space or a fixed sum. A government is defined as a pair consisting of a majority coalition and a policy supported by this coalition. The majority coalition may be not minimal winning. Each party is allowed to give one qualification to a policy on a certain issue and to a majority coalition: desirable of a certain degree, acceptable, or unacceptable. By representing party preferences the way we do, we can include both rent-seeking and idealistic motivations in one consistent model. We define the value of a policy/coalition/government to a party, and the notions of a feasible and stable policy/coalition/government. The model uses party preferences in order to predict government policy. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence and uniqueness of a stable government are investigated. Moreover, some alternative definitions of a ‘stable’ government are introduced, and relations between these definitions and the chosen definition of a stable government are established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the egalitarian solution for convex cooperative fuzzy games is introduced. The classical Dutta–Ray algorithm for finding the constrained egalitarian solution for convex crisp games is adjusted to provide the egalitarian solution of a convex fuzzy game. For arbitrary fuzzy games, the equal division core is introduced. It turns out that both the equal division core and the egalitarian solution of a convex fuzzy game coincide with the corresponding equal division core and the constrained egalitarian solution, respectively, of the related crisp game. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article focuses on the strange respectability of the Situationist City. The paper engages with the present reinvention of the Situationist Movement and argues that the rediscovery of the "Situationist City" celebrates an intellectualized, aestheticized and depoliticized version that is particularly oblivious to the political and revolutionary theories and programmatic emancipatory urban agenda that underpinned the Situationist Movement. The Situationist city has indeed become strangely respectable. It has become part of the commercialized cultural trail and spectacularized capitalist that economist Guy Debord dissected. For Debord, the pivot of capitalist economy and culture is a commodity. Central to the Debord's politics is a condemnation of contemplation and of non participation which, for him entail not only total abduction but are central to the perpetuation of the spectacle. Examples of the spectacular recapture and revalorization of urban space as a part of a political strategy of social transformation are the successive occupations of the central streets of the cities like Seattle, London etc. by an eclectic coalition of anti-capitalist activists.

The Marxian theory of social class has always been troubled by the fact that the coalitions that individuals form have not, by and large, been consistent with the pattern of asset ownership. The purpose of this paper is to add another dimension to some of the existing approaches to this 'goodness-of-fit' problem. This is done by using n-person game theory to examine the coalitions that individuals would be expected to form in a struggle over division of the surplus. This provides a partial analysis of fragmentation within the working class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]