Do Exploitive Agents Benefit from Asymmetric Power in International Politics?

Endowing agents that prefer cooperative outcomes with asymmetric power substantially increase the chances that both cooperative agents survive and that cooperative worlds evolve across a variety of structural settings of conflict and cooperation present in international relations; particularly when agents are endowed with the ability to selectively interact with other agents. These results are consistent with the general finding that non-compulsory play consistently helps cooperators. The question addressed in this analysis is whether or not asymmetric power also helps exploitive agents in the same structural settings; a question heretofore not analyzed. Contrary to expectations, the simulation results reported here suggest that exploitive agents benefit from asymmetric power only in very restricted circumstances; ones relativity unlikely to occur in international relations. In effect there is an asymmetry in the benefits of asymmetric power. Introduction Whether and how cooperation emerges and can be maintained in social settings characterized by the presence of selfish agents engaged in repeated relations without central authority has been of considerable importance to scholars of international politics. In particular, international relations scholars have been interested in features of agents (typically nation-states), the relations among agents, and the structural environment agents are embedded in that make cooperation either possible or more likely. Nation-states, of course, are differentiated on many dimensions and it is not surprising that differentiation among agents in terms of power and capability, labeled here asymmetric power, has been of particular interest to international relations scholars because such asymmetries have been an enduring feature of international systems. In an earlier analysis Majeski constructed a set of agent-based models based upon a group of repeated 2X2 games (Prisoners Dilemma, Chicken, Stag, Assurance, and Deadlock) and examined the effects of the introduction of asymmetric power among agents on the emergence of cooperation. The analysis demonstrated that the introduction of asymmetric power substantially increased the chances that cooperative agents survived and that cooperative worlds evolved; particularly when agents were endowed with the ability to selectively interact with other agents in their world. Selective interaction helps agents that want to cooperate more effectively establish and maintain what could be characterized as cooperative regimes where norms of niceness, retaliation, and limited forgiveness prevail. For those cooperative regimes to be maintained agents must punish both free riders and exploiters.