The evolution of cooperation in the public goods game on the scale-free community networks under multiple strategy updating rules

Social networks have a scale-free property and community structure, and many problems in life have the characteristic of public goods, such as resource shortage. Due to different preferences of individuals, there exist individuals who adopt heterogeneous strategies updating rules in the network. We investigate the evolution of cooperation in the scale-free community network with public goods games and the influence of multiple strategy updating rules. Here, two types of strategy updating rules are considered which are pairwise comparison rules and aspiration-driven rules. Numerical simulations are conducted and presented corresponding results. We find that community structure promotes the emergence of cooperation in public goods games. In the meantime, there is a "U" shape relationship between the frequency of cooperators and the proportion of the two strategy updating rules. With the variance in the proportion of the two strategy updating rules, pairwise comparison rules seem to be more sensitive. Compared with aspiration-driven rules, pairwise comparison rules play a more important role in promoting cooperation. Our work may be helpful to understand the evolution of cooperation in social networks.Comment: 6 figures, 11 page

Learning to resolve social dilemmas: a survey

Social dilemmas are situations of inter-dependent decision making in which individual rationality can lead to outcomes with poor social qualities. The ubiquity of social dilemmas in social, biological, and computational systems has generated substantial research across these diverse disciplines into the study of mechanisms for avoiding deficient outcomes by promoting and maintaining mutual cooperation. Much of this research is focused on studying how individuals faced with a dilemma can learn to cooperate by adapting their behaviours according to their past experience. In particular, three types of learning approaches have been studied: evolutionary game-theoretic learning, reinforcement learning, and best-response learning. This article is a comprehensive integrated survey of these learning approaches in the context of dilemma games. We formally introduce dilemma games and their inherent challenges. We then outline the three learning approaches and, for each approach, provide a survey of the solutions proposed for dilemma resolution. Finally, we provide a comparative summary and discuss directions in which further research is needed

How does regulation affect innovation and technology change in the water sector in England and Wales?

This thesis examines the role of regulation in technological change in the water sector in England and Wales. Based on a combination of Social-Ecological Systems (SES) theory and the Multi-Level Perspective on technological transitions a Comparative Information-Graded Approach (CIGA) is developed in Part 1. As part of the CIGA, a series of tools is used for characterizing and evaluating the relationship between regulation and technology. In Part 2, the CIGA is applied to characterize the relationship between regulation and water innovation in England and Wales based on official publications, Environment Agency data, and interviews. In particular, 7 mechanisms are identified by which regulation affects innovation and 5 issues of trust negatively interact with innovation. As trust is established through these mechanisms, opportunities for innovation are at times sacrificed. Part 3 develops and analyses a set of models based on findings in Part 2. Dynamical systems and fictitious play analysis of a trustee game model of regulation exhibits cyclicality providing an explanation for observed cycles which create an inconsistent drive for innovation. Trustee and coordination models are evaluated in Chapter 7 highlighting how most tools struggle with the issue of technological lock-in. Chapter 8 develops a model of two innovators and a public good water technology over time, showing the role foresight plays in this context as well as the disincentive to develop it. Taken together, the CIGA characterization and modelling work provide a series of recommendations and insights into how the system of regulation affects technology change.Open Acces

How Do Organisations Improve Cross-border Partnerships

By identifying consistent operational and cultural patterns, the thesis develops a cross-border cultural partnering model. With it, organisations can predict how cultural differences with their partner(s) might impact the development of their co-operations and proactively take measures to mitigate the risks and improve the outcome at each stage of the partnership maturation. Contribution to knowledge doesn’t fall into a specific area of theory but rather in those domains of knowledge – e.g. interorganisation, culture - which it integrates to provide a synthetical model on how cross-border partnerships can improve and therefore grow their positive role as an increasingly important form of cross-organisational structure. Real world observation intimates that strategic partnering has become integral to state and business affairs but is often a ‘hit and miss’ approach that fails or underperforms far more times than it succeeds – especially when practised across borders. Extensive scholarly literature exists on the essential and growing role of strategic partnerships – the why – and their manifestations and achievements – the what. But little is available on the ways they develop and the disciplines they require to perform well – the how. And there is no systematic approach to the considerable impact of national cultural differences, as they markedly amplify the risk and lead to quasi-systematic lower performance. Cases are countless, as some regions and countries are more or less predisposed to succeed in developing transformational partnerships. Hence culture fitness to partnering is a major strategic concern for firms, governments, NGOs and academic leadership. In application to Van de Ven’s ‘Engaged Scholarship’ research methodology, a ‘Pragmatist Integrative’ literature review approach was used to collect extensive data from literature and hundreds of practitioner cases. They were structured to determine: 1) the critical cultural traits to improve partnerships; 2) how they impact on the core partnering activities; 3) how some national cultural traits are fit – or less so – to the core partnering activities. Consistent patterns emerged, which enabled to form a cross-border cultural partnering modelled approach

Advances in the sociology of trust and cooperation: theory, experiments, and field studies

The problem of cooperation and social order is one of the core issues in the social sciences. The key question is how humans, groups, institutions, and countries can avoid or overcome the collective good dilemmas that could lead to a Hobbesian war of all against all. Using the general set of social dilemmas as a paradigmatic example, rigorous formal analysis can stimulate scientific progress in several ways. The book, consisting of original articles, provides state of the art examples of research along these lines: theoretical, experimental, and field studies on trust and cooperation. The theoretical work covers articles on trust and control, reputation formation, and paradigmatic articles on the benefits and caveats of abstracting reality into models. The experimental articles treat lab based tests of models of trust and reputation, and the effects of the social and institutional embeddedness on behavior in cooperative interactions and possibly emerging inequalities. The field studies test these models in applied settings such as cooperation between organizations, informal care, and different kinds of collaboration networks. The book will be exemplary for rigorous sociology and social sciences more in general in a variety of ways: There is a focus on effects of social conditions, in particular different forms of social and institutional embeddedness, on social outcomes. Theorizing about and testing of effects of social contexts on individual and group outcomes is one of the main aims of sociological research. Modelling efforts include formal explications of micro-macro links that are typically easily overlooked when argumentation is intuitive and impressionistic Extensive attention is paid to unintended effects of intentional behavior, another feature that is a direct consequence of formal theoretical modelling and in-depth data-analyses of the social processe

Advances in the Sociology of Trust and Cooperation

The book identifies conditions for trust and cooperation. It highlights unintended consequences of individually rational behavior, and shows how trust and cooperation change dependent on social embeddedness. Such analyses inspire experimental tests in lab conditions, but also tests through empirical applications in field studies. The results of this mixed-method approach can in turn be used to inspire further theoretical work

Humanist Narratology and the Suburban Ensemble Dramedy

What is a “humanistic drama”? Although we might describe narrative works as humanist, and references to the humanistic drama abound across a breadth of critical media, including film and literary theory, the parameters of these terms remain elliptical. My work attempts to clarify the narrative conditions of humanism. In particular, humanists ask how we use narrative texts to complicate our understanding of others, and question the ethics and efficacy of attempts to represent human social complexity in fiction. After historicising narrative humanism and situating it among related philosophies, I develop humanist hermeneutics as a method for reading fictive texts, and provide examples of such readings. I integrate literary Darwinism, anthropology, cognitive science and social psychology into a social narratology, which catalogues the social functions of narrative. This expansive study asks how we can unite the descriptive capabilities of social science with the more prescriptive ethical inquiry of traditional humanism, and aims to demonstrate their productive compatibility. From this groundwork, I then look at a cluster of humanistic film texts: the suburban ensemble dramedy, a phenomenon in millennial American cinema politicising the quotidian and the domestic. Popular works include The Kids Are All Right, Little Miss Sunshine, Little Children, Junebug, The Oranges, and what is arguably the inciting feature in a wave of such films entering production, American Beauty. I provide examples of humanist readings of these films at two levels: an overview of genre development as social phenomenon (including histories of suburban depiction onscreen, ensemble cinema and affective experimentation in recent American filmmaking), followed by a close reading of a progenitor text, Ron Howard's 1989 film Parenthood

Lifelines

Harris Solomon takes readers into the trauma ward of one of Mumbai’s busiest public hospitals, narrating the stories of the patients, providers, families, and frontline workers who experience and treat traumatic injury from traffic

A systems theoretical and reflexive law framework for the regulation of religious family life

What is the best institutional relationship between law and religion in family life? This question arises in response to a double-bind: some individuals within religious groups experience discrimination in their communities. However, in seeking civil remedies these individuals may be forced to abandon parts of their religious identities: they struggle to express themselves as both religious individuals and bearers of human rights because the systems that mediate their experience of the world make absolutist demands upon them. This Thesis makes three central contributions based on reflexive law: First, it identifies reliance on direct, command and control interventions in religious and family life as a common thread across existing models. Despite different conceptual positions on the relationship between law and religion, these interventions have tended to rely on and assume direct forms of State regulation. Second, it argues that systems are resistant to these direct, external interventions, leading to a trilemma: ineffectiveness, unresponsiveness or incoherence. This Thesis uses the trilemma as an analytical lens to deconstruct the examples of mahr agreements and religious divorce across four example jurisdictions: UK, Canada, India and Israel. This analysis establishes two criteria to structure decisions about the circumstances and manner of State interventions in family life: first, interventions should preserve functional differentiation and communicative freedoms. Second, interventions ought to be justified according to the normative criteria of relational autonomy, substantive equality and care. These criteria – reflexive and normative - are interwoven: reflexivity is underpinned by values and in turn these values are necessary for this vision of a functionally differentiated society. Third, this Thesis proposes a reflexive model for devising particularised, indirect interventions intended to alter these systems and modify power structures. This Thesis defends an arrangement that promotes bounded self-regulation of religious family life through a decentralised, collaborative and democratically experimental model

Intellectual Property Through a Non-Western Lens: Patents in Islamic Law

The intersection of secular, Western intellectual property law and Islamic law is undertheorized in legal scholarship. Yet the nascent and developing non-Western law of one form of intellectual property—patents—in Islamic legal systems is profoundly important for transformational innovation and economic development initiatives of Muslim-majority countries that comprise nearly one-fifth of the world’s population. Recent scholarship highlights the tensions of intellectual property in Islamic law because religious considerations in an Islamic society do not fully align with Western notions of patents. As Islamic legal systems have begun to embrace patents in recent decades, theories of patents have presented conceptual and theological debates under classical Islamic law, creating an undefined scope of patent protection under international agreements. On the one hand, patents are not mentioned in sources of Islamic law, which, unlike Western systems, gives a religious guide to Muslim societies, and which some Muslim scholars argue create impermissible monopolistic effects. On the other hand, patents should be implicitly derived based on human reasoning of a divine law with theoretically and theologically sound commercial justifications. This Article’s thesis is that patents are permissible in an Islamic legal system. It develops a positive, normative framework and justifications for the construct of a theory of patents within Islamic law, provides normative implications within a commercial lens, and provides prescriptions for patentable subject matter and public interest considerations in a modern Islamic legal system. Recognizing the role and need of patents in Islamic legal systems is a pressing issue for innovation policy and requires articulation of conceptual, theological, and theoretical principles