Working to Understand Cooperative Forces in Government Extended Enterprises: Concepts and Methodology

This paper describes our continuing effort to use the case of the Christmas Day Bomber to investigate the idea that decision makers can leverage four “canonical forces” to increase the amount of voluntary cooperation within what we call “government extended enterprises” (GEEs). It outlines key concepts, postulated relationships, and a game theoretic methodology (an n -player iterated stag hunt) actualized in an agent-based simulation. Our GEE concept extends the traditional supply chain-based “extended enterprise” concept to accommodate networks of relatively autonomous government organizations that lack the more static supplier-customer relationships seen in supply chains. A GEE is a dynamical system of systems (SoS) pursuing one or more public goals, potentially at a cost to the component organizations´ private goals, rendering each decision situation about costly cooperation a social dilemma for the components. Analysis focuses on the level of “belonging,” a Boardman-Sauser “SoS differentiating characteristic” that, in our case, reflects the cooperativeness of GEE components. Preliminary results indicate that the stag hunt is an appropriate game for the case study; taken singly, sympathy is stronger than trust, fear or greed; fear has little impact on its own but dampens other forces; and the higher payoffs earned may justify the risks inherent in cooperation, especially for uncertain agents.