Viable Alternatives to the Status Quo

Collective decision making occurs within constraints associated with the option to maintain the status quo. If this default option is sufficiently attractive to participants and the rules imply that blocking coalitions can form, then these constraints delimit the decision problem's core solution—the most important solution concept in the theory of cooperative games. The results presented in this article demonstrate that these constraints have important effects on the outcomes of collective decisions, regardless of whether or not the problem has a core solution. In the laboratory situation, a five-person committee makes a separate decision under four-fifths majority rule about each in a series of six distinct choice problems. This design enables us to analyze the independent effects of variations in the status quo on the outcomes of collective-decision problems in which blocking coalitions are possible, controlling for whether or not the game has a core solution.