A program to improve analytic methods related to strategic forces

In an effort to improve the strategic assessment capabilities of the U.S. Department of Defense, contractors were asked to integrate advanced wargaming techniques with other analytic approaches. This paper sets out the deficiences in past and current analysis methods which the project sponsor wished to have the contractors address.     

兵团农产品绿色营销战略探析

农产品绿色营销发展成为世界农产品市场营销新动向.兵团要大力发展绿色农业,在农业领域必须贯彻绿色营销观念,才能不断提升兵团农业的持续竞争力,实现农业可持续发展.本文分析了兵团农产品绿色营销现状与意义,提出兵团农产品兵团农产品绿色营销战略及措施.     

Examining the immanent dilemma of small states in the Asia-Pacific: the strategic triangle between New Zealand,the US and China

ABSTRACT

Small states throughout the Asia-Pacific are confronted by a growing dilemma over how to balance their traditional security ties with the US and rapidly growing trade with China. This gives Washington and Beijing potential leverage over small states to use within their competition with one another. This article explores the implications of this for New Zealand – a small South Pacific state that prides itself on maintaining an independent foreign policy. Situated within the small state literature, it utilises a material-based strategic triangle to illustrate the fundamental facets of New Zealand's position. Relatedly, the article examines how Wellington has managed its burgeoning relations with China and the US over the past decade and critically considers New Zealand's independent foreign policy. It finds that New Zealand has adopted a mixed set of strategies to manage its position between the US and China, closely aligning itself with Washington while remaining nonaligned on some key security issues in the Asia-Pacific region. New Zealand has certainly not opted for neutrality. The article concludes that New Zealand and other small states must remain vigilant, may want to consider alternative strategies of alignment, and outlines a number of areas where additional research could prove fruitful.     

Why strategic intelligence analysis has limited influence on American foreign policy

Why does strategic intelligence analysis have limited influence on American foreign policy? Intelligence analysis is frequently disregarded, this paper contends, because it is a duplicated step in the decision-making process and supplements but does not supplant policy assessment. Many intelligence analyses will confirm policy assessments and be redundant or – if the assessments are different – policy-makers will choose their own interpretations over those of intelligence analysts. The findings of this paper provide scholars with important insights into the limits of intelligence analysis in the foreign policy process as well as recommendations for increasing its positive impact on policy.     

Positivism and its limitations for strategic intelligence: a non-constructivist info-gap critique

Knowledge underlies rational choice between options. Predictive optimization is the prioritization of options according to their predicted outcomes based on available knowledge. The epistemological justification of predictive optimization is based on positivism, which asserts that facts and laws about the world exist and are discoverable. However, knowledge of human affairs in strategic adversarial interactions is often severely limited and erroneous: residual uncertainty is often vast. This results especially from deception and innovation by the adversary which introduce deep Knightian uncertainty. Consequently, predictive optimization is unreliable: outcomes may differ substantially from predictions. An alternative strategy for prioritization of options is info-gap robust satisficing: achieve critical goals (that are adequate but perhaps suboptimal) over a wide range of deviation of reality from current knowledge. The epistemological justification of robust satisficing is based on extending positivism to acknowledge and manage the unknown. Prioritization of options by robust satisficing manages both the limitations of knowledge and the need for achieving critical goals. This critique of positivism is not constructivist. Rather, we extend positivism to account for highly deficient knowledge. We present several examples and conclude by discussing the relation between inductive, abductive and deductive inference.     

Policy signals and strategic voting for minor parties: Evidence from Germany

How does executive power-sharing in multiparty democracies influence voter decision-making? The current scholarship has identified two strategies that voters use to target coalitions and that involve voting for a minor party: Coalition insurance voting and compensatory voting. Yet these strategies are not differentiated conceptually, and empirically, are observationally equivalent. By foregrounding the role of policy signals in strategic voting for minor parties, the present study disentangles these strategies at the theoretical and empirical levels. It also proposes a new, hybrid, strategy. To do so, it uses data on the 2013 and 2017 German federal elections from campaign-period surveys, polls and an original dataset of the candidates’ tweets about policy issues. The results show evidence of policy-driven voters using a hybrid strategy in 2013 and a compensatory strategy in 2017. There is no evidence of coalition insurance voting in these elections.     

Transitioning policy: co-production of a new strategic framework for energy innovation policy in the Netherlands

This article describes policy–science interactions in a transition process in which we were involved as scientists. We describe the interactions that occurred in a project for the fourth National Environmental Policy Plan in the Netherlands. The project was successful in that it produced a new concept and set of principles for policy to deal with persistent problems such as global climate change, which were used in the national policy plan. The new concept was that of transition and the principles were: policy integration, long-term thinking for short-term action, keeping multiple options open and learning-by-doing and doing-by-learning. Retrospectively, we ask ourselves: what factors facilitated the acceptance of the first ideas about transition management? Reconstructing the events and drawing on interviews with key individuals involved, we have tried to find the key factors for the adoption of the ideas developed in the project. Finally, we reflect upon our role as scientists-advisors and the role of others in the development of a new story line and set of principles for policy. Our own assessment, 8 years later, is that we were engaged in boundary work.     

General Blotto: games of allocative strategic mismatch

The Colonel Blotto game captures strategic situations in which players attempt to mismatch an opponent’s action. We extend Colonel Blotto to a class of General Blotto games that allow for more general payoffs and externalities between fronts. These extensions make Blotto applicable to a variety of real-world problems. We find that like Colonel Blotto, most General Blotto games do not have pure strategy equilibria. Using a replicator dynamics learning model, we show that General Blotto may have more predictable dynamics than the original Blotto game. Thus, adding realistic structure to Colonel Blotto may, paradoxically, make it less complex.     

Sincere and strategic voters: An Israeli study

The theoretical literature on voting behavior has shown that a rational voter may sometimes decide to vote for a candidate or party that does not constitute his or her first preference. Such voters are traditionally called strategic voters, in contrast to voters who act sincerely, i.e., those who always vote for their first preference regardless of how others are likely to vote. After discussing some of the problems associated with the definition of these two types of voters and suggesting a new operational definition, some attitudes and characteristics of these two types of voters are investigated. It was found that strategic voters constitute a very small percentage of the entire electorate, that their education level is significantly higher than that of sincere voters, that they tend more often to believe that polls influence voters' decisions and hence tend to delay their own final voting decision, that they tend more often than sincere voters to support small parties but do not tend more often than sincere voters to switch the party they decide to support from one election to the next, and that there is no significant difference between them and sincere voters regarding which governing coalition should/will form following an election.     

Building global strategic alliances in the virtual space: a structural analysis of international nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations' transnational relationship networks

This study provides a benchmark analysis of how over 500 environmental international nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) used websites to communicate with the general public around the world and build virtual relationships with their strategic allies. Using social network analysis and data mining, this study found that INGOs were able to attract a considerable number of visitors from multiple countries. In addition, INGOs used their hyperlinks to build a globally connected network. Shared mission was an important consideration in INGOs' relationship building strategy. Further, many INGOs built reciprocal hyperlinks with other INGOs. A large number of INGOs were well embedded in in‐groups but developed less connection with out‐group organizations. Implications for practice, future research and theory building are discussed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Infinitely repeated contests: How strategic interaction affects the efficiency of governance

Contests over the scope and strength of regulation and governance are commonplace – and commonly repeated. The same players vie for the same government prize year after year: for example, environmental standards, government contracts, research grants, and public good provision. The open question is whether more rents are dissipated in repeated regulatory contests than onetime competitions. This question matters for regulation and governance because societies should design policies to waste the fewest scarce resources. According to some, the answer is “no”, but others say “yes”– more resources are wasted when people compete repeatedly for the same government prize. Herein, we use two game theoretic equilibrium concepts to help untangle the answer. Our results suggest non‐myopic contestants are more likely to behave as partners than rivals – provided the context is relatively sterile. Several common complications help break up the tacit partnership, including a disparity in relative ability, a shrinking prize, and additional players.