POLSCI 1G06 Lecture 1: Sep 10 - Lecture (POLI SCI)
15 May 2016
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Document Summary
According to one textbook (dickerson and flanagan), government has to do with compulsion, not voluntary decision making. Government is a specialized activity of those individuals that make and enforce public decisions that are binding upon the whole community (p4) . Government, then, is the institutional apparatus that makes and enforces rules on society. But note the bolded terms: government seems very top-down according to this de nition. One (possible) way of answering this question is by applying game theory, particularly the prisoners dilemma: game theory is a way of modelling and predicting how human beings will interact given speci c circumstances and assumptions. Prisoners dilemma (one type of game scenario) asks the question of how individuals are likely to act (given speci c assumptions about individual rationality)in an environment where there is no authority in place to enforce agreements. The result of the game: people behaving rationally on an individual level can generate outcomes that are irrational.
