The “self-bad, partner-worse” strategy inhibits cooperation in networked populations

The emergence and maintenance of cooperation is a popular topic in studies of information sciences and evolutionary game theory. In two-player iterated games, memory in terms of the outcome of previous interactions and the strategy choices of co-players are of great referential significance for subsequent strategy actions. It is generally recognized that there is no single simple and overarching strategy whereby one player X can unilaterally achieve a higher payoff than his opponent Y, irrespective of Y's strategy and response. In this paper, we demonstrate that such strategies do exist in diverse networked populations. More precisely, (i) such strategies can obtain a low payoff for the focal player, however, they also lead to an even lower payoff for that player's partner, in turn lowering benefits of the overall populations; (ii) they are capable of winning with a high probability against opponents with an unknown strategy; and (iii) they have a survival advantage and robust fitness in terms of evolutionary processes. We refer to these as the “self-bad, partner-worse” (SBPW) strategies. Results presented here add to previous studies on strategy evolution in the context of social dilemmas and hint at some insights concerning cooperation promotion mechanisms among networked populations

Strategic control and strategic communication

This paper studies the optimal allocation of decision rights between an uninformed principal and an informed agent when interdependent activities need to be adapted to local conditions. While the principal cares only about overall profits the agent may favor higher, or lower, levels for each activity than the profit-maximizing level. The principal has limited commitment power and can only commit to an ex-ante allocation of decision rights. Whenever the principal retains some (or all) decision rights the agent communicates his information strategically, i.e. via cheap talk. We show that if activities are complementary the principal can always improve the informativeness of communication by sharing control with the agent, while sharing control over activities that interact as substitutes always worsens communication. As a result of this communication advantage, sharing control over complementary activities can be optimal, while control over activities that interact as substitutes is optimally allocated to the same party

Soft Power Revisited: What Attraction Is in International Relations

This thesis problematises the bases of soft power, that is, causal mechanisms connecting the agent (A) and the subject (B) of a power relationship. As the literature review reveals, their underspecification by neoliberal IR scholars, the leading proponents of the soft power concept, has caused a great deal of scholarly confusion over such questions as how to clearly differentiate between hard and soft power, how attraction (soft power’s primary mechanism) works and what roles structural and relational forces play in hard/soft power. In an effort to ascertain the bases, I address this issue not from the viewpoint of A’s policies or resources, like do IR neoliberal scholars, but in terms of B’s psychological perception of A. Employing social psychological accounts, I argue that attraction can be produced in three distinct ways, namely 1) through B’s identification with A (“emotional” attraction), 2) via B’s appreciation of A’s competence/knowledge in a particular field (“rational” attraction) and 3) by means of the activation of B’s internalised values which contextually prescribe B to act in A’s favour (“social” attraction). Importantly, depending upon the way attraction is produced, it is peculiar in a number of characteristics, the main of which are power scope, weight and durability. Insights from social psychology also show that unlike soft power, hard power requires not only B’s relevant perception of the A-B relationship (as coercive or rewarding), but also A’s capability to actualise a threat of punishment and/or a promise of reward. I argue this difference can be fairly treated as definitional rather than empirical, which implies that coercion and reward necessarily have both relational and structural dimensions, whereas for attraction, a structural one alone suffices, while a relational one may or may not be present. Having explicated the soft power bases, I illustrate each of them using three “most likely” case studies, namely Serbia’s policies towards Russia (emotional attraction), Kazakhstan’s approach to relations with the EU (rational attraction) and Germany’s policies vis-à-vis Israel (social attraction)

Lab Labor: What Can Labor Economists Learn from the Lab?

This paper surveys the contributions of laboratory experiments to labor economics. We begin with a discussion of methodological issues: why (and when) is a lab experiment the best approach; how do laboratory experiments compare to field experiments; and what are the main design issues? We then summarize the substantive contributions of laboratory experiments to our understanding of principal-agent interactions, social preferences, union-firm bargaining, arbitration, gender differentials, discrimination, job search, and labor markets more generally.personnel economics, principal-agent theory, laboratory experiments, labor economics

Labor Market Institutions Around the World

This paper documents the large cross-country differences in labor institutions that make them a candidate explanatory factor for the divergent economic performance of countries and reviews what economists have learned about the effects of these institutions on economic outcomes. It identifies three ways in which institutions affect economic performance: by altering incentives, by facilitating efficient bargaining, and by increasing information, communication, and trust. The evidence shows that labor institutions reduce the dispersion of earnings and income inequality, which alters incentives, but finds equivocal effects on other aggregate outcomes, such as employment and unemployment. Given weaknesses in the crosscountry data on which most studies focus, the paper argues for increased use of micro-data, simulations, and experiments to illuminate how labor institutions operate and affect outcomes.labour market, unemployment

Delegation to the European Commission in EU migration policy : expertise, credibility, and efficiency

In 1999, with the entry into force of the Amsterdam Treaty, European Union (EU) migration went from being an area of intergovernmental cooperation to one governed by ever closer version of the Community Method. This shift resulted in a significant production of secondary legislation being agreed at the EU level, regarding all areas upon which the EU had some degrees of competence, namely asylum and refugee, irregular migration, legal migration, administrative cooperation, and border and visa policy. The academic literature is divided in how to interpret policy developments in this area. Some academic contributions have emphasised the divergence from traditional EU policy methods, others have analysed migration policy in the perspective of traditional questions about EU integration, and the majority had some normative assessments of the policies being formulated. This thesis tackles EU migration policy from the point of view of delegation. It proposes to assess the extent of EU integration in this area by measuring the amount of powers the Council of the European Union has granted to the European Commission. The dissertation finds that delegation has occurred in this policy area, and to an extent that is comparable to other, older policy areas, but is uneven across migration categories. Past delegation studies highlighted a number of possible determinants of delegation, such as reducing uncertainty, strengthening the credibility of commitments, achieving efficiency, as well as institutional contexts. This dissertation finds evidence for the credibility and efficiency rationales, as well as conflict between the Council and the Commission. This study is relevant to current debates about how much power EU institutions are and should be granted, whether these institutions are biased towards the nature of the policies, and current trends in EU integration

Labor Market Institutions Around the World

The paper documents the large cross-country differences in labor institutions that make them a candidate explanatory factor for the divergent economic performance of countries and reviews what economists have learned about the effects of these institutions on economic outcomes. It identifies three ways in which institutions affect economic performance: by altering incentives, by facilitating efficient bargaining, and by increasing information, communication, and trust. The evidence shows that labor institutions reduce the dispersion of earnings and income inequality, which alters incentives, but finds equivocal effects on other aggregate outcomes, such as employment and unemployment. Given weaknesses in the cross-country data on which most studies focus, the paper argues for increased use of micro-data, simulations, and experiments to illuminate how labor institutions operate and affect outcomes.

KRNC: New Foundations for Permissionless Byzantine Consensus and Global Monetary Stability

This paper applies biomimetic engineering to the problem of permissionless Byzantine consensus and achieves results that surpass the prior state of the art by four orders of magnitude. It introduces a biologically inspired asymmetric Sybil-resistance mechanism, Proof-of-Balance, which can replace symmetric Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake weighting schemes. The biomimetic mechanism is incorporated into a permissionless blockchain protocol, Key Retroactivity Network Consensus ("KRNC"), which delivers ~40,000 times the security and speed of today's decentralized ledgers. KRNC allows the fiat money that the public already owns to be upgraded with cryptographic inflation protection, eliminating the problems inherent in bootstrapping new currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. The paper includes two independently significant contributions to the literature. First, it replaces the non-structural axioms invoked in prior work with a new formal method for reasoning about trust, liveness, and safety from first principles. Second, it demonstrates how two previously overlooked exploits, book-prize attacks and pseudo-transfer attacks, collectively undermine the security guarantees of all prior permissionless ledgers.Comment: 104 page

Incentive-driven QoS in peer-to-peer overlays

A well known problem in peer-to-peer overlays is that no single entity has control over the software, hardware and configuration of peers. Thus, each peer can selfishly adapt its behaviour to maximise its benefit from the overlay. This thesis is concerned with the modelling and design of incentive mechanisms for QoS-overlays: resource allocation protocols that provide strategic peers with participation incentives, while at the same time optimising the performance of the peer-to-peer distribution overlay. The contributions of this thesis are as follows. First, we present PledgeRoute, a novel contribution accounting system that can be used, along with a set of reciprocity policies, as an incentive mechanism to encourage peers to contribute resources even when users are not actively consuming overlay services. This mechanism uses a decentralised credit network, is resilient to sybil attacks, and allows peers to achieve time and space deferred contribution reciprocity. Then, we present a novel, QoS-aware resource allocation model based on Vickrey auctions that uses PledgeRoute as a substrate. It acts as an incentive mechanism by providing efficient overlay construction, while at the same time allocating increasing service quality to those peers that contribute more to the network. The model is then applied to lagsensitive chunk swarming, and some of its properties are explored for different peer delay distributions. When considering QoS overlays deployed over the best-effort Internet, the quality received by a client cannot be adjudicated completely to either its serving peer or the intervening network between them. By drawing parallels between this situation and well-known hidden action situations in microeconomics, we propose a novel scheme to ensure adherence to advertised QoS levels. We then apply it to delay-sensitive chunk distribution overlays and present the optimal contract payments required, along with a method for QoS contract enforcement through reciprocative strategies. We also present a probabilistic model for application-layer delay as a function of the prevailing network conditions. Finally, we address the incentives of managed overlays, and the prediction of their behaviour. We propose two novel models of multihoming managed overlay incentives in which overlays can freely allocate their traffic flows between different ISPs. One is obtained by optimising an overlay utility function with desired properties, while the other is designed for data-driven least-squares fitting of the cross elasticity of demand. This last model is then used to solve for ISP profit maximisation

Science diplomacy and trans-boundary water management. The Orontes River case

The Mediterranean Basin in general, and more specifically its southeastern part, is encountering rapid changes leading to huge water stress and the tiniest percentage of available drinking water per inhabitant in the world. Changes leading to water scarcity include growing population, with rates annually exceeding 2.8%, and excessive water demand for irrigation. Climate change exacerbates water droughts and risks. Overall national sovereignty, political, social and economic factors seem to be equally important to the scarcity of water resources, which may influence conflicts and violent clashes (\u201cwater riots\u201d).This is the reason why water and hydro-diplomacy occupy a central space on the diplomatic agenda of the governments in the region, including Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Egypt and Turkey. To guarantee the equitable use of water resources for the population of the countries involved, a major task of hydro-diplomacy is to overcome a number of challenges and critical thresholds by exploring all possible options for consensus building and by using reliable scientific evidence.Hydro-diplomacy, as applied in the case of the Orontes, builds partly on traditional bilateral approaches, taking account of power relations, partly on observing International Law and partly on pursuing new methods and tendencies based on the analyses of the actual water needs at national and local level, considering in particular the most vulnerable communities and enhancing prospects for social and economic development.The present publication is based, on one hand, on the results of the ICT project funded by the Italian Development Cooperation (Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation) through the University of Insubria, and on the other hand, on the data and accumulated experience of hydro-diplomacy efforts. It thus brings together two approaches: first a crisp analysis of the evolution in addressing the water challenges applying technological tools on basin management, and secondly, a pragmatic one, based on a case study dealing with water resources in the Middle East