Effects of Anticipation in Individually Motivated Behaviour on Control and Survival in a Multi-Agent Scenario with Resource Constraints

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 3.0 which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Self-organization and survival are inextricably bound to an agent’s ability to control and anticipate its environment. Here we assess both skills when multiple agents compete for a scarce resource. Drawing on insights from psychology, microsociology and control theory, we examine how different assumptions about the behaviour of an agent’s peers in the anticipation process affect subjective control and survival strategies. To quantify control and drive behaviour, we use the recently developed information-theoretic quantity of empowerment with the principle of empowerment maximization. In two experiments involving extensive simulations, we show that agents develop risk-seeking, risk-averse and mixed strategies, which correspond to greedy, parsimonious and mixed behaviour. Although the principle of empowerment maximization is highly generic, the emerging strategies are consistent with what one would expect from rational individuals with dedicated utility models. Our results support empowerment maximization as a universal drive for guided self-organization in collective agent systemsPeer reviewedFinal Published versio

Discovering Communication

What kind of motivation drives child language development? This article presents a computational model and a robotic experiment to articulate the hypothesis that children discover communication as a result of exploring and playing with their environment. The considered robotic agent is intrinsically motivated towards situations in which it optimally progresses in learning. To experience optimal learning progress, it must avoid situations already familiar but also situations where nothing can be learnt. The robot is placed in an environment in which both communicating and non-communicating objects are present. As a consequence of its intrinsic motivation, the robot explores this environment in an organized manner focusing first on non-communicative activities and then discovering the learning potential of certain types of interactive behaviour. In this experiment, the agent ends up being interested by communication through vocal interactions without having a specific drive for communication

An experience of teacher education on task design in Colombia

We describe an experience in task design within an in-service secondary mathematics teacher education program in Colombia. Following a model known as didactic analysis, a team of researchers, educators, mentors and practicing teachers worked together in designing, implementing, assessing and reformulating secondary school mathematics tasks. We present here the main features of the framework on which the program is based, identify some of the characteristics of the experience lived by trainees, educators and researchers on task design during the first implementation of the program, and analyse the trainees’ assessment on their own proposals of tasks and on the contribution of the program on their task design competencies

Cognition in Seemingly Riskless Choices and Judgments

The assumption of given and known preferences and possibilities so common in economic theory stands in contradiction with the kind of unsystematic change that charaterizes many experimental and real situations. Consequently the theory misspecifies rational choice and generates many puzzles relating to marginal analysis, sunk costs, judgments of fairness, the endowment effect, etc. We instillate rational cognition and learning in seemingly riskless choices and judgments. Preferences and possibilities are given in a stochastic sense and based on revisable expectations. The theory predicts experimental preference reversals and passes a sharp econometric test of the status quo bias drawn from a field study. En sciences économiques, l'hypothèse que les préférences et les possibilités sont connues et données est largement contredite par des changements peu systématiques observés dans plusieurs expériences et situations réelles. La conséquence est que la théorie ne semble pas spécifier correctement la rationalité des choix et pose aux économistes plusieurs paradoxes reliés à l'analyse marginale, aux coûts historiques, sur les jugements de justice, sur les effets de dotation ou de statu quo, etc. Dans cette étude, nous concidérons la rationalité cognitive et l'apprentissage dans des situations de choix et de jugements apparemment sans risque. Les préférences et les possibilités sont données dans un sens stochastique et elles sont basées sur les anticipations qui sont révisées. La théorie proposée prédit des renversements de préférence dans les expériences et passe avec succès un test économétrique sur données réelles du paradoxe du biais du statu quo.

Post-macroeconomics -- reflections on the crisis and strategic directions ahead

For decades, many researchers argued that economics had nothing to fear from enriching itself with lessons and advances from other disciplines. Unfortunately, these suggestions were either neglected or dismissed upfront in what was then arbitrarily considered mainstream economics. The global crisis has led even Nobel Prize winners to acknowledge that the problem facing economists and policy makers today is mostly intellectual - it is the need to confront the systematic failure of thinking, especially on the part of macroeconomists. Despite its unprecedented magnitude and heavy financial, human, and intellectual cost, the crisis certainly does not invalidate everything that has been learned about macroeconomics. However, the costs highlight some of mistakes of the dominant intellectual macroeconomic framework. Post-macroeconomics should not be understood as another metanarrative of the end of metanarratives. The use of the prefix post here suggests and emphasizes much more than temporal posterity. Post-macroeconomics should follow from macroeconomics more than it follows after macroeconomics. The theorizing of post-macroeconomics is therefore neither systematically oppositional nor hegemonic. It does not advocate a - dialectic opposition - between macroeconomics and post-macroeconomics. Rather, it suggests that the latter builds on the former and goes beyond it.Economic Theory&Research,Debt Markets,,Banks&Banking Reform,Access to Finance

The role of regional institutional entrepreneurs in the emergence of clusters in nanotechnologies

In the case of new technologies like nanotechnology, institutional entrepreneurs appear who have to act at different levels (organizational, regional, national) at the same time. We reconstruct, in some detail, the history of two cases, in Grenoble and in Twente/Netherlands. An intriguing finding is that institutional entrepreneurs build their environment before changing their institution. They first mobilize European support to convince local and national levels before actual cluster building occurs. Only later will there be reactions against any de-institutionalisation caused at the base location. The Dutch case shows another notable finding: when mobilizing support the entrepreneur will have to agree to further conditions, and then ends up in a different situation (a broad national consortium) than originally envisaged (the final cluster involved a collaboration of Twente with two other centres). In general, an institutional entrepreneur attempts to create momentum, and when this is achieved, he has to follow rather than lead it.INSTITUTIONAL ENTREPRENEUR; DEINSTITUTIONALISATION; CLUSTER; LOCATION; EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES; PROMISE; NANOTECHNOLOGY