Collaborative law dynamics: collegiality in civil litigation?

摘要

In the Markovian paradoxical games that unfold in business and civil litigation, participants choose between collegiality and discord tactics. In business, for example, managers accomplish tasks either by working collaboratively or by working alone. Similarly, in civil litigation, lawyers can choose collegiality to resolve conflict amicably or, alternatively, use discord to producer even more conflict. Four system dynamics game models help explore the dynamic repercussions of these two means of conflict resolution in business and civil litigation. The models portray two-contestant, paradoxical self-referential games of non-constant sum (one's loss is not automatically the other's payoff) conflicts. Two players or groups compete with dynamic (time varying) probabilities of collaboration. Their game is paradoxical because both parties can either win or lose simultaneously. It is self-referential when the payoff, prior discord and loss parameters depend on the players' collaboration probabilities. Past research has found similar game models with exogenous parameters to be conservative, possessing two centers around which games can oscillate forever. But with endogenous parameters the dynamics becomes dissipative, possessing a single fixed-point attractor of moderate equal gains. Large subsets of initial discord tactics converge on the fixed-point attractor to sustain collegiality equilibria. The game ends once the point attractor has absorbed all dynamics, leaving the system in a stable, negative feedback state. If both players collaborate without undue bias and preconceived opinions, and equally discount each other's collegiality or lack of it, then the stable attractor moves closer to maximum payoff, where both parties collaborate with probability 1 (one). In the asymmetric model, however, one of the players can take less into account the other's collegiality or discord tactics. Then, it is the most impartial player or group that profits the most!