What if Congress made another supercommittee to come up with a budget, but this time, the Republicans pick which Democrats get on the committee, and vice versa? Wouldn’t that force each party to pick moderates, and thus force the committee to be ideologically similar enough to come up with a deal?
I’m not so much concerned with the actual realities of the situation, but rather from a game-theoretical standpoint. Assume all congressman can be plotted on an ideological spectrum, as can any budget proposal. Also assume Congress (and any subset thereof) can’t negotiate a deal if it has party members that are too spread apart on the spectrum. Finally, assume any deal is better than no deal, but “waiting it out” for a better deal in round 2 is a viable strategy.
Second, is there any better method or getting a good deal passed, considering these rules? Even if it’s insanely complicated. Perhaps this is a well-studied dilemma I’ve never heard of.
I actually don’t think republicans or democrats would pick the most moderate from eachother’s parties. I think they would pick the absolute most partisan, just to ensure nothing gets done in the committee.
Let’s say the Democrats pick the most extreme conservative Republicans in Congress - and the Republicans pick the most conservative Democrats they can find. Sure the conservative Democrats will be less conservative than the conservative Republicans but you still have an overall conservative group that will probably be able to reach some kind of conservative consensus. And the same thing happens if the Republicans tried to game the system by picking the most liberal Democrats and the Democrats responded by picking relatively liberal Republicans.
These possibilities mean each side is motivated to try to pick the members of the other party who are ideologically closest to their own party - liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. And the result would be a group that’s ideologically fairly close.
I swear, I’m sure I remember reading this very suggestion, for this very reason, sometime during the ill-fated tenure of the original supercommittee. (Quite possibly here on this very SDMB I think.)
Maybe that would have worked if they had tried it then. Maybe.
If Congress were to try that trick again today, I think it would more likely go as drewtwo99 suggests above – they’d deliberately do whatever it takes to self-sabotage and accomplish nothing, just to maintain maximal manufactured crisis levels. (Well, at least certain participants would, but we can’t get into debates here in GQ as to who those would probably be.)
Well, the US Congress is probably the most studied political body in all of political science, and a lot of game theory is used successfully to model what it does and does not do (in spite of Duckster’s dumb joke). I’m not too familiar with the literature here and I have not followed this sequester business so I can’t really comment on the specifics myself. Generally speaking though, I think the assumption that ‘any deal is better than no deal’ should be re-evaluated because it appears that the relevant parties here might have a different preference ranking than you think they do. If the assumption does hold, though, you’d probably be looking at a game of (iterated) chicken.
The fatal flaw is that you assume Congress wants a solution. Right now both sides of the aisle want to raise taxes on different groups and spend 150% of that increased revenue on their own pork projects.
One wonders, though, to what extent do the congresscritters themselves understand and apply formal, mathematical game theory? Or to what extent to “skillful politicians” do this at an intuitive level?
I think the common impression is that successful politicians are those that have some kind of intuitive gut-level understanding of the game, especially human psychology. I’ve never read any analysis giving a formal mathematical model of congressional actions, or at least, not that congresscritters themselves do the formal math.
Whether Congress (or its individual members or coalitions thereof) want a solution or not, might itself be a game-theoretical strategy. The current notion that Congress is thriving on contrived manufactured crisis suggests that they’ve done some kind of game-theory analysis and concluded that this is actually a strategy.
Separately, I wonder if the problem of the extreme ideologues in Congress (mainly, the so-called “Tea Party” types) lies in their total failure to understand game theory (or failure to be willing to play that game). Their absolutist, uncompromising postures seem to be counterproductive and are causing serious internal disruption within the Republican Party itself, let alone dealing with Democrats, and trouble with the voters too (as shown in the last elections). Playing game theory seems to be well outside the choices being made by the absolutists.
Game theory absolutely does not rely on any understanding of game theory by the players in the game. There are minimal assumptions about rationality, but people in the game don’t need to understand those assumptions, they just need to meet the criteria. It’s similar to how economists describe market players as maximizing their profits by seeking the point where marginal utility bla bla bla - it’s not like they think people running banana stands by the marina actually sit down plotting their utility curves finding their bliss points, they just behave as though they do. This, of course, is potentially a serious problem for game theory, but under a certain set of conditions it seems to work. So no, game theory does not care whether congress critters or their staff draw up strategy matrices and playing out the prisoners’ dilemma finding their dominant strategy - they’re just interested in describing the preferences and strategies that rational actors pursue and how those interactions lead to certain (possibly collectively sub-optimal but nonetheless individually) rational outcomes.
Incidentally, formal mathematical models of congressional action are the bread and butter of political science - they’re about as mainstream as political science can get in the US (which is pretty much the center of Political Science worldwide).
A strategy is the complete list of responses to any given situation. A solution is an outcome but can never be a strategy. Strategies may rely on preference rankings in which a number of solutions (as well as no solution) are ranked. What you mean is that they may have done an analysis which determined that this (‘thriving on contrived crisis’) is a strategy that will maximize their utility (‘some policy outcome (including no change) in the short run, reelection in the longer run’ - I’m not sure how this would be filled out).
A problem here is that you mix up your levels of analysis. The sentence ‘Congress is thriving … and they’ve done some kind of analysis’ suggests that Congress is a unitary actor - but strategy is not made at the congressional level, at least not commonly. Any model would have to acknowledge members of congress as unitary actors with possibly the parties as an additional level of collective action. But treating Congress as a whole won’t do.
No - this is not how game theory works. You don’t have some people playing the game and others not playing the game or not understanding it. The game here is voting and the rules are the rules of Congress. Tea partiers are playing that game too. Just because this leads to outcomes that you don’t find acceptable or pleasant does not mean that they are irrational. Again, level of analysis is important here. The standard assumption in models of parliamentary behavior is that elected officials want to be re-elected. If there is serious disruption within the Republic party, why would that matter to some individual congress person who gets their face on CNN and strengthens his chances of reelection? It’s perfectly compatible with a model of rational action and tea-partiers have not been particularly unsuccessful in getting reelected so there is nothing to suggest that they are irrational as per a game-theoretical understanding of that term, even if their party is going to shit. The same goes for ‘Their absolutist, uncompromising postures seem to be counterproductive’ - counterproductive for whom?
Long story short, game theory has a far broader understanding of rationality and of playing the game than is commonly understood. There’s this expression ‘playing the game’ that means that beyond basically knowing the rules of some social setting and following those, you understand people, you grease wheels, you know how to ‘get things’ outside of formal channels, etc. Your comment that game theory is about ‘intuitive gut-level understanding of the game, especially human psychology’ suggests that you think it’s about this first set of things - but you’re wrong. This is not the understanding of ‘game’ that game theory relies on, where the game is an informal exchange that exists in addition to formal social relations. Instead, game theory models all rules formal and informal (although they often ignore those latter ones to their detriment) in an effort to describe social behavior.
I don’t know about game theory, but the problem in reality would be that those moderate Republicans don’t exist in a vacuum, they’re still Republicans. If they were seen to be ‘selling out’ the cause they’d suffer consequences with their party leaders and with voters. So I doubt the result would have been any different.
This example pretty much was tested: President Obama and John Boehner negotiated privately over the same debt ceiling issue. Those two men essentially agreed to a deal, but it was then scuppered by pressure put on them from the rest of their parties (either Eric Cantor/Paul Ryan on the Republican side or various Democrats on Obama’s side, depending on who you believe).
