Treaty theory - applied systems analysis

Today I read on treaty theory, which is a fancy way of saying that today was a kind of boring day. The treaty theory in question called itself Applied Systems Analysis. What might that mean? Good question. In practice it seems to mean an approach that is quite broad in scope (looks at all sorts of aspects from two-level negotiation problems to agenda-setting, issue linkage, and negotiators themselves - rather than focusing on a particular aspect assumed to be most important) and takes an attitude that is more pragmatic and descriptive (that is, more interested in describing actual practice than deriving it from principles) than many sectors of IR theory. That's about as specific as I can get.

If my implication that this approach doesn't strongly define itself seems at all dismissive, consider this quote on the history of the formation of the (international, West-Soviet cooperative) institute from whence the book issued. The author

"hesitatingly suggested to the founding negotiators the title 'Applied Systems Analysis.' That caught on because no one had a previous conception of what it really meant. It was what I call 'creative obfuscation,' a technique that was used at several junctures in the writing of IIASA's charter. Another example of creative obfuscation: since we got hung up on the term advanced societies, we substituted the term modern societies, and again no one really knew what that meant."

--Howard Raiffa, "Contributions of Applied Systems Analysis to International Negotiation." International Negotiation: Analysis, Approaches, Issues. Ed. Victor A. Kremenyuk. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002.

Heh.

The work thus far is a clear illustration of the central analytic trade-off in international relations; if you try to take a pragmatic, descriptive approach, you find yourself doing work that either does not generalize or (as in this case) becomes quite vague in expression - at best a set of recommendations about general issues and tradeoffs that ought generally to be considered when approaching a specific problem. Works that make simplifying assumptions and attempt to reduce political behavior to a more manageable set of principles allow the analyst to make observations that seem much more powerful and pointed - but at the price of becoming ever less plausible as descriptions of real-world behavior.

Anyway, the reading today tangentially got me thinking about the relationship of bargaining to the size of the negotiating pool. It seems intuitively likely that the complexity of "horse-trading" - that is, bargaining where I offer concessions in an area you care about but I don't in return for different concessions in an area I care about but you don't - goes up as the number of discreet parties to a negotiation increases. This would suggest that the more parties you have to a negotiation, the more likely you are to have to default to a solution built around equity - the same outcome for everyone - as opposed to trying to horsetrade among 50 different parties. (This would be unfortunate because "everyone gets the same thing" solutions are less complex but also generally less efficient.) But is it so in practice?