Adversarial process

== Adversarial process is a term used to describe a procedure that sets up a specific and focused conflict, often taking place in the form of a percieved game. Placed in a competitive dyad, onen often seeks to apply the role of victorand failure.

This is typically an attempt to gain or display leveragein some form, whether commercial, social, or otherwise. ==
 

 The following are possible scenarios in which this process could be employed:

The use of an open voting systemto choose candidates to hold political and/or military power.
This can be an adversarial process since it requires each candidate to convince voters that they are more qualified to perform in the expected future circumstances, than their opponent.

Another possibility is the use of a court of law to decide the social attitude of an alleged wrong-doing of a defendant, and penalties to be assessed, and restitution to be awarded.

 This is adversarial as the opposing attorneys are competing to convince the judge to include or exclude evidence or witnesses, and competing to convince the judge or jury of the guilt or innocence of the defendant, and severity of the impact of the actions (if guilty) on the plaintiff or victim. Lawyers must be held to rather specific ethical codes, e.g. rules of civil procedure, in order to ensure that their tactics do not cause an undue burden on larger society, e.g. freeing defendants who have admitted that they are not only guilty but intend to offend again.
Lawyers differ on whether the process should be seen as strictly adversarial, in order to ensure they retain the trust of clients and the overall process retains the trust of society; or whether the ethics of the larger society should play a role in their behavior, 

A third example of an adversarial process is the operation of market systems, e.g. commodity markets. In these, bid and ask prices are constantly compared, with sellers representing goods as being valuable and buyers haggling and claiming they are less valuable.

Product markets tend to focus on the comparison of sellers' products with other sellers' products - the adversarial process itself making trustworthy information, e.g. as published in Consumer Reportsor the Better Business Bureau, hard to compile and to obtain.
 Health advocates often claim that market systems are very difficult to reconcile with food, nutrition, agriculture or medicine's need to work well with living systems - a key complaint of the anti-globalization movement.

Despite these hesitations, adversarial process is frequently overly employed in modern Western civilization.

It can become difficult, for some, to imagine working without them. 
The alternatives; consensus decision makingand deliberative democracy(which tend to alternate adversary, discussion, and voting over a longer period of time allocated to make the decision and explore implications).
While they are less well studied in political scienceand economics. Most commentators are suspicious of the seemingly utopian goals of the advocates of such adversarial processes, viewing competition as essential to a good result.

 Activists argue that adversarial process works well and should probably be expanded to areas that are presently less adversarial.  For instance, advocating "science courts" and "prediction markets" that would force the scientist, economist and technologist to put reputations and money on the line, rather than trusting them based on reputation without a disciplined follow-up to see if they were right or wrong.  These ideas are increasingly popular in part because such alternative courts and markets can be more easily attained in the Internet age.

Even wikipediacan act as a possible example of adversarial process.

The continuous alternating edits to an article are often seeking to balance what is seen (by each author in turn) as an extreme point of view.  

The idea of wikipedia:neutral point of viewinherently assumes that such adversaries will eventually converge to some kind of agreement, more or less the same assumption as is made in supply-demand curves in economics.

See also: consensus decision making, voting system, advocacy

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adversarial+process Wikipedia article Adversarial process.