The importance of structure in linking games

A common approach in modeling negotiations is to apply game theory to single issues. Recent work has suggested that the complexity of international negotiations can be better modeled by linking independent games. Successful linking is possible when the linked issues have compensating asymmetry of similar magnitude. An important result of linked games is that such games produce a greater feasible set of choices relative to the aggregated isolated games. In this paper, we demonstrate that achieving strict dominance of the linked game is not trivial and that results and implications depend on the structures of the isolated games. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V.