Returns-Based Beliefs and The Prisoner's Dilemma

Economists have highlighted a number of game-theoretic contradictions and paradoxes i

Evolutionary Multiplayer Games

Evolutionary game theory has become one of the most diverse and far reaching theories in biology. Applications of this theory range from cell dynamics to social evolution. However, many applications make it clear that inherent non-linearities of natural systems need to be taken into account. One way of introducing such non-linearities into evolutionary games is by the inclusion of multiple players. An example is of social dilemmas, where group benefits could e.g.\ increase less than linear with the number of cooperators. Such multiplayer games can be introduced in all the fields where evolutionary game theory is already well established. However, the inclusion of non-linearities can help to advance the analysis of systems which are known to be complex, e.g. in the case of non-Mendelian inheritance. We review the diachronic theory and applications of multiplayer evolutionary games and present the current state of the field. Our aim is a summary of the theoretical results from well-mixed populations in infinite as well as finite populations. We also discuss examples from three fields where the theory has been successfully applied, ecology, social sciences and population genetics. In closing, we probe certain future directions which can be explored using the complexity of multiplayer games while preserving the promise of simplicity of evolutionary games.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures, review pape

Fear or Greed? Duty or Solidarity? Motivations and Stages of Moral Reasoning: Experimental Evidences from Public-Goods Provision Dilemmas

As economists increasingly recognize the limits of the canonical self-interest assumption, the lack of a theory of human valuation that clearly specifies what determines an individual’s utility judgments renders the prediction of behavior in social dilemmas virtually impossible.  In this study, we examined the explanatory power of a structuralist-constructivist theory of adult development and this theory’s analytical significance to the understanding of behavioral diversity in situations where individual and collective interests collide. Experimental results suggest that the theoretical constructs built into the selected theory provide a reliable basis for predicting participants’ behavior when presented with two different collective-action dilemmas under diverse institutional conditions.social dilemmas, experimental economics, sociocognitive and moral reasoning, adult development, Institutional and Behavioral Economics, C72, C92, D74,

Happiness, Morality, and Game Theory

Non-cooperative Games, Happiness, Morality.

Understanding Leadership A Coordination Theory

Important aspects of leadership behavior can be rendered intelligible through a focus on coordination games. The concept of common knowledge is shown to be particularly important to understanding leadership. Thus, leaders may establish common knowledge conditions and assist the coordination of strategies in this way, or make decisions in situations where coordination problems persist in spite of common knowledge.Game theory, management, organization

Perfect Prediction in Minkowski Spacetime: Perfectly Transparent Equilibrium for Dynamic Games with Imperfect Information

The assumptions of necessary rationality and necessary knowledge of strategies, also known as perfect prediction, lead to at most one surviving outcome, immune to the knowledge that the players have of them. Solutions concepts implementing this approach have been defined on both dynamic games with perfect information and no ties, the Perfect Prediction Equilibrium, and strategic games with no ties, the Perfectly Transparent Equilibrium. In this paper, we generalize the Perfectly Transparent Equilibrium to games in extensive form with imperfect information and no ties. Both the Perfect Prediction Equilibrium and the Perfectly Transparent Equilibrium for strategic games become special cases of this generalized equilibrium concept. The generalized equilibrium, if there are no ties in the payoffs, is at most unique, and is Pareto-optimal. We also contribute a special-relativistic interpretation of a subclass of the games in extensive form with imperfect information as a directed acyclic graph of decisions made by any number of agents, each decision being located at a specific position in Minkowski spacetime, and the information sets and game structure being derived from the causal structure. Strategic games correspond to a setup with only spacelike-separated decisions, and dynamic games to one with only timelike-separated decisions. The generalized Perfectly Transparent Equilibrium thus characterizes the outcome and payoffs reached in a general setup where decisions can be located in any generic positions in Minkowski spacetime, under necessary rationality and necessary knowledge of strategies. We also argue that this provides a directly usable mathematical framework for the design of extension theories of quantum physics with a weakened free choice assumption.Comment: 25 pages, updated technical repor