More than thirty years of ultimatum bargaining experiments: Motives, variations, and a survey of the recent literature

Take-it or leave-it offers are probably as old as mankind. Our objective here is, first, to provide a, probably subjectively-colored, recollection of the initial ultimatum game experiment, its motivation and the immediate responses. Second, we discuss important extensions of the standard ultimatum bargaining game in a unified framework, and, third, we offer a survey of the experimental ultimatum bargaining literature containing papers published since the turn of the century. The paper argues that the ultimatum game is an extremely versatile tool for research in bargaining and on social preferences. Finally, we provide examples for open research questions and directions for future studies

Give Coercive Diplomacy a Chance? The “Ideal Policy" for Coercive Diplomacy Success

This thesis examines coercive diplomacy theory by testing P.V. Jakobsen’s conceptual “ideal policy” framework identifying four minimum conditions for coercive diplomacy success. The ideal policy is a parsimonious framework derived to determine the probability for success or explain coercive diplomacy outcomes post hoc. The aim of the theory- testing is to evaluate if the conceptual framework can explain recent coercive diplomacy outcomes post hoc. The empirical material builds on two American coercive diplomacy attempts directed towards Muammar Gadhafi’s Libya. The ideal policy conditions also serves as the basis for a comparative analysis of the two cases as stipulated by the structured, focused comparison method

Dynamic causal mining

Causality plays a central role in human reasoning, in particular, in common human decision-making, by providing a basis for strategy selection. The main aim of the research reported in this thesis is to develop a new way to identify dynamic causal relationships between attributes of a system. The first part of the thesis introduces the development of a new data mining algorithm, called Dynamic Causal Mining (DCM), which extracts rules from data sets based on simultaneous time stamps. The rules derived can be combined into policies, which can simulate the future behaviour of systems. New rules can be added to the policies depending on the degree of accuracy. In addition, facilities to process categorical or numerical attributes directly and approaches to prune the rule set efficiently are implemented in the DCM algorithm. The second part of the thesis discusses how to improve the DCM algorithm in order to identify delay and feedback relationships. Fuzzy logic is applied to manage the rules and policies flexibly and accurately during the learning process and help the algorithm to find feasible solutions. The third part of the thesis describes the application of the suggested algorithm to a problem in the game-theoretic domain. This part concludes with the suggestion to use concept lattices as a method to represent and structure the discovered knowledge

Redemptive failure in contemporary American sports literature

This thesis explores America’s fascination with its own sports as purveyors of national identity. American literature has found unique inspiration in sporting competition, not only depicting professional athletes, but drawing from the experiences of fans and amateurs. While the athlete’s heroism and eventual fall has been analysed in previous discussions of this topic, my route of inquiry positions decline and defeat as more central and complex concepts. The focus of this thesis is on the remarkably diverse ways in which contemporary writers reimagine aspects of sporting failure both for their characters and within their own creative process. The centrality of failure seems an affront to the United States’ celebration of success and victory. However, the common strand in the most ambitious contemporary sports writing is to portray experiences of loss and failure as paradoxical routes to self-affirmation. Postmodern writing on sports has taken from the drama and narrative implicit in sporting contest, but uses this framework to question ideas of masculinity, ethnicity, memory and myth. The writers I discuss incorporate failure into these themes to arrive at points of redemptive discovery

Beyond the Suffering of Being: Desire in Giacomo Leopardi and Samuel Beckett

This book challenges critical approaches that argue for Giacomo Leopardi’s and Samuel Beckett’s pessimism and nihilism. Such approaches stem from the quotation of Leopardi in Beckett’s monograph Proust, as part of a discussion about the removal of desire. Nonetheless, in contrast to ataraxia as a form of ablation of desire, the desire of and for the Other is here presented as central in the two authors’ oeuvres. Desire in Leopardi and Beckett is read as lying at the cusp between the theories of Jacques Lacan and Emmanuel Levinas, a desire that splits as much as it moulds the subject when called to address the Other (inspiring what Levinas terms ‘infinity’ as opposed to ‘totality,’ an infinity pitted against the nothingness crucial to pessimist and nihilist readings)

Mimetic rivalry in shared virtual environments: A study of conflict and imitation in World of Warcraft

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonMounting evidence from neuroscience, clinical psychology and human development points to significance of imitation in human behaviour, interpersonal relationships and collectively pursued activities. These group activities include participation in online multiplayer computer games, massively multiplayer online games or other kinds of socially situated gaming. However, despite the growing salience of either subject, a wide-scale research of imitation in collective play is yet to be carried out. This study addresses this gap in knowledge by looking at imitative phenomena in massively multiplayer online gaming from the conceptual perspective of René Girard’s mimetic hypothesis. The hypothesis proceeds from the following assumptions: goal commitment is activated by reflexive imitation and regulated by goal proximity; extrinsic goal value is reciprocally accrued within the goal pursuing group; competing motivations towards collectively pursued goals result in intra-group aggression. Mimetic impulse is, therefore, formally equivalent to conflictual imitation. This thesis seeks to register how conflictual imitation may be encouraged by the game and reproduced by the players. The study applies a combination of formal and phenomenological approach to World of Warcraft player experience, specifically, that obtained at the highest difficulty of collective play. Subjective analytical outcomes are corroborated by evidence from fieldwork which took place over the period of two years and enabled the researcher to engage with the subject from the perspective of high competence and literacy. To offset the possible confirmation bias and support the analytical findings and field observations with quantitative data, the study introduces a comparative survey of World of Warcraft players. The 334 respondents include 164 Russian-speaking gamers: a representative sample for what is widely regarded as a hyper-competitive gamer community

Unfoldings

Thesis (M.S.V.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1992.Includes bibliographical references and index.Huizinga's analysis of play, described in his text Homo Ludens, is compared to the creative process in art-making and to the creative response of the viewer. The play process is examined through questionnaire responses and observations made during an evening of experimental play. Huizinga's assertion that play is not a factor in the plastic arts is challenged. Refutations and counterexamples drawn from the history of art since the Renaissance show that play is indeed a factor. The artistic movements cited are those which provide examples of works having either particularly playful or particularly mathematical content, or both, including Anamorphic painting; Dada; Bauhaus; Neo-Plasticism; Concrete Art; Op Art; Fluxus; and Kinetic Art. Special attention is given to the works of Alexander Calder, George Rickey, and Yaacov Agam. The author describes a personal iconography, and introduces the geometric foundation of her sculptural works, which derive from the geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller's "vector-equilibrium jitterbug." Descriptions, photographs, and drawings are included for the author's Thesis Project, comprising several kinetic, manipulatable jitterbug sculptures.Caryn L. Johnson.M.S.V.S