Abstract
In infrastructure planning, more and more citizens are participating in decision making process. Such process is often called “participatory planning.” This paper focuses on the aspect of participatory planning as an “institutionalized” conflict. In an institutionalized conflict, only a few players can take actions. Other citizens can observe a development of the conflict, but they can affect the process only indirectly. Players try to behave according to the preferences of their “supporters.” In such a conflict, players need to communicate with supporters to know their preferences. However, players and supporters cannot necessarily share the knowledge about interaction of players’ behaviors (strategies), and they tend to use more simplified mechanisms. Under such simplified mechanisms, players may take different behavior principles, and a final outcome of a conflict can be changed.
In this paper, an institutionalized conflict in participatory planning is assumed, and an appropriate opinion-summarizing mechanism between players and supporters is examined. First, the conflict in participatory planning is modeled as non-cooperative game. Then, the relationship between an opinion-summarizing mechanism and an outcome of the conflict is analyzed, and the mechanism based on preference on actions may lead to an inefficient outcome. It is also shown that the effect of opinion-summarizing mechanisms depends on the structure of a conflict.
