Negative-sum conflicts happen due to factual disagreements (mostly inaccurate assessments of relative power), not value disagreements.
By ‘negative-sum’ do you really mean ‘negative for all parties’? Because, taking ‘negative-sum’ literally, we can imagine a variant of the Prisoner’s Dilemma where A defecting gains 1 and costs B 2, and where B defecting gains 3 and costs A 10.
How does that make sense? You are correct that under sufficiently generous Coasian assumptions, any attempt at predation will be negotiated into a zero-sum transfer, thus avoiding a negative-sum conflict. But that is still a violation of Pareto optimality, which requires that nobody ends up worse off.
I don’t understand your comment. There can be many Pareto optimal outcomes. For example, “Alice gives Bob a million dollars” is Pareto optimal, even though it makes Alice worse off than the other Pareto optimal outcome where everyone keeps their money.
Yes, this was a confusion on my part. You are right that starting from a Pareto-optimal state, a pure transfer results in another Pareto-optimal state.
By ‘negative-sum’ do you really mean ‘negative for all parties’? Because, taking ‘negative-sum’ literally, we can imagine a variant of the Prisoner’s Dilemma where A defecting gains 1 and costs B 2, and where B defecting gains 3 and costs A 10.
I suppose I meant “Pareto-suboptimal”. Sorry.
How does that make sense? You are correct that under sufficiently generous Coasian assumptions, any attempt at predation will be negotiated into a zero-sum transfer, thus avoiding a negative-sum conflict. But that is still a violation of Pareto optimality, which requires that nobody ends up worse off.
I don’t understand your comment. There can be many Pareto optimal outcomes. For example, “Alice gives Bob a million dollars” is Pareto optimal, even though it makes Alice worse off than the other Pareto optimal outcome where everyone keeps their money.
Yes, this was a confusion on my part. You are right that starting from a Pareto-optimal state, a pure transfer results in another Pareto-optimal state.