Competing Norms of Distribution in Coalition Games

Most social psychological studies of coalition formation involve the assignment to subjects of different quantities of some resource such as weights or votes. Most coalition theories assume that these resources, or "sources of entitlement" as they are referred to here, call into play appropriate norms of distribution (such as parity) which determine the outcome of the game. There has been, however, little work on the effect of the competition of such norms when individuals may make competing claims on the basis of the possession of different sources of entitlement. The research reported here represents an initial attempt to assess such effects. Subjects in a three-person coalition game were asked to act as representatives of groups which differed in size, the collective effort of its members, and its ability to increase the total payoff to a coalition. Two studies are reported; one employed responses to a questionnaire, and the second involved role-playing by participants. The results of the questionnaire supported the hypothesis of strength in weakness for the effort and size factors, but those results did not, in general, carry over into the experimental bargaining. In neither study did weakness in economic entitlement benefit a subject. It was concluded that the strength in weakness hypothesis has limited applicability and seems to apply only in those cases where an actor's weakness can be effectively translated into a benefit for a potential partner. Minimum resource theory was seen to be a special case of that hypothesis.