The Communist Bloc and the Foreign aid Game

Most of the game-theoretic literature concentrates on zero-sum games, i.e., situations of pure conflict, simply because these situations are driven by a more rigorous logic than are non-zero-sum games. The results are quite relevant to war, UN voting, and other international situations in which and losing are obvious, easily defined concepts, in which all participating nations are either winners or losers. But foreign aid is a more complex process; attempts to apply zero-sum game theory here have yielded surprising, sometimes bizarre, results.' Here at least we may accept Schelling's thesis that the subtleties of non-zero-sum games produce more useful insights than the mathematics of pure conflict.2 In doing this we sacrifice rigor to relevance. I therefore propose a model of foreign aid as a three-player, non-zero-sum game. Two of the players, the United States and the Soviet Union, are termed active since they make and control the moves. The third player is the world of developing countries. I shall call this player passive for now, although its style of play may become more aggressive later in the game. The three players are not arbitrary coalitions of interchangeable players trying to achieve some weighted majority or winning coalition. They are rather three classes of nations brought about by political and economic forces quite unrelated to foreign aid. Although the United States and the Soviet Union give the great bulk of foreign aid, some is also given by the allies of these two powers. For the sake of simplicity, I assume complete unity among these allies. Thus I equate the Soviet Union with the entire Communist system I treat the system as a Bloc in the true sense of the word. Competitive aid from different Communist countries and intra-Bloc aid be

Communism · Economics · Foreign policy · Game theory · International relations · Law and economics · Mathematical economics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Relevance (law) · Zero (linguistics) · Zero-sum game · Game Theory and Applications · Geology · Law · Mathematics · Philosophy · Post-Communist Economic and Political Transition

• Soviet - American relations

  Open Access•Jan F Triska, Jan Třı́ska et al.•Journal of Conflict Resolution•1965

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