Structuring the multi-issue and hub-spoke games found in public administration

Real world decision making on socio-technical systems, such as the railways, is complex. The system contains technical uncertainties; multiple actors with different incentives are involved; institutional rules play a role and external events have a big influence on the process of decision making. Game theory helps in understanding the complexity of the situation by structuring the different elements of the process: the actors, actions, payoffs and information. However, by only considering these elements, the situation is often made too simple and therefore not applicable by decision makers in real life situations. The field of public administration entails various concepts that do take the rich context of the decision making processes into account, however, the formal representation is missing. In this paper, we present examples of public administration concepts formalized using game theoretical methods. This way, we are able to capture more richness of the process while at the same time create structure and insight for the decision maker.