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What Is Team Reasoning?

‘You and another person have to choose whether to click on A or B. If you both click on A you will both receive £100, if you both click on B you will both receive £1, and if you click on different letters you will receive nothing. What should you do?’ (Bacharach 2006, p. 35) Team reasoning is a game-theoretic attempt to explain what makes your both choosing A rational. But what is team reasoning?

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Notes

Prerequisites

This section depends on you having studied some other sections:

Aim

This section provides an informal explanation of team reasoning starting from Bacharach’s initial characterisation:

‘somebody team reasons if she works out the best possible feasible combination of actions for all the members of her team, then does her part in it.’ (Bacharach, 2006, p. 121)

Alternative Approach

Although not covered in these lectures, Misyak & Chater (2014)’s proposal about virtual bargaining also looks like a promising development of game theory.

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Glossary

team reasoning : ‘somebody team reasons if she works out the best possible feasible combination of actions for all the members of her team, then does her part in it’ (Bacharach, 2006, p. 121).

References

Bacharach, M. (2006). Beyond individual choice. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Retrieved from http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b3272720~S1
Misyak, J. B., & Chater, N. (2014). Virtual bargaining: A theory of social decision-making. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 369(1655), 20130487. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0487
Sugden, R. (2000). Team preferences. Economics and Philosophy, 16, 175–204.