Unification and Secession: Group Size and ‘Escape from Lock‐In’
用博弈论模型说明，国家统一或分离带来的群体规模变化，可能帮助国家摆脱协调博弈中的低效均衡，从而解释为何改革常伴随领土变动，并揭示改革不受欢迎的深层原因。
Recently, several countries undergoing dramatic political, economic, and social reform augmented their populations through national unification (e.g., Germany) or reduced them through secession (e.g., Czechoslovakia). The authors show, in a simple game-theoretic framework, that these changes in group size may provide an escape for countries locked in a coordination game's inferior equilibrium. This 'escape from lock-in' approach (1) explains the observed coincidence between countries undertaking unification/secession and those undergoing fundamental reform of the type that requires wholesale changes in individual behavior and transactional norms, and (2) provides a reason--beyond the more obvious distributional, uncertainty, and rent-seeking considerations--for the often-cited unpopularity of reform. Copyright 1998 by WWZ and Helbing & Lichtenhahn Verlag AG