3,690 research outputs found
Evolutionary game dynamics of controlled and automatic decision-making
We integrate dual-process theories of human cognition with evolutionary game
theory to study the evolution of automatic and controlled decision-making
processes. We introduce a model where agents who make decisions using either
automatic or controlled processing compete with each other for survival. Agents
using automatic processing act quickly and so are more likely to acquire
resources, but agents using controlled processing are better planners and so
make more effective use of the resources they have. Using the replicator
equation, we characterize the conditions under which automatic or controlled
agents dominate, when coexistence is possible, and when bistability occurs. We
then extend the replicator equation to consider feedback between the state of
the population and the environment. Under conditions where having a greater
proportion of controlled agents either enriches the environment or enhances the
competitive advantage of automatic agents, we find that limit cycles can occur,
leading to persistent oscillations in the population dynamics. Critically,
however, these limit cycles only emerge when feedback occurs on a sufficiently
long time scale. Our results shed light on the connection between evolution and
human cognition, and demonstrate necessary conditions for the rise and fall of
rationality.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure
Safety management theory and the military expeditionary organization: A critical theoretical reflection
Management of safety within organizations has become a key topic within safety science. Theorizing on this subject covers a diverse pallet of concepts such as “resilience” and “safety management systems”. Recent studies indicate that safety management theory has deficiencies. Our interpretation of these deficiencies is that much confusion originates from the issue that crucial meta-theoretical assumptions are mostly implicit or applied inconsistently. In particular, we argue that these meta-theoretical assumptions are of a systems theoretical nature. Therefore, we provide a framework that will be able to explicate and reflect on systems theoretical assumptions. With this framework, we analyze the ability of two frequently used safety management theories to tackle the problem of managing safety of Dutch military expeditionary organizations. This paper will show that inconsistent and implicit application of systems theoretical assumptions in these safety management theories results in problems to tackle such a practical problem adequately. We conclude with a reflection on the pros and cons of our framework. Also, we suggest particular meta-theoretical aspects that seem to be essential for applying safety management theory to organizations
Chore division on a graph
The paper considers fair allocation of indivisible nondisposable items that
generate disutility (chores). We assume that these items are placed in the
vertices of a graph and each agent's share has to form a connected subgraph of
this graph. Although a similar model has been investigated before for goods, we
show that the goods and chores settings are inherently different. In
particular, it is impossible to derive the solution of the chores instance from
the solution of its naturally associated fair division instance. We consider
three common fair division solution concepts, namely proportionality,
envy-freeness and equitability, and two individual disutility aggregation
functions: additive and maximum based. We show that deciding the existence of a
fair allocation is hard even if the underlying graph is a path or a star. We
also present some efficiently solvable special cases for these graph
topologies
Truthful Assignment without Money
We study the design of truthful mechanisms that do not use payments for the
generalized assignment problem (GAP) and its variants. An instance of the GAP
consists of a bipartite graph with jobs on one side and machines on the other.
Machines have capacities and edges have values and sizes; the goal is to
construct a welfare maximizing feasible assignment. In our model of private
valuations, motivated by impossibility results, the value and sizes on all
job-machine pairs are public information; however, whether an edge exists or
not in the bipartite graph is a job's private information.
We study several variants of the GAP starting with matching. For the
unweighted version, we give an optimal strategyproof mechanism; for maximum
weight bipartite matching, however, we show give a 2-approximate strategyproof
mechanism and show by a matching lowerbound that this is optimal. Next we study
knapsack-like problems, which are APX-hard. For these problems, we develop a
general LP-based technique that extends the ideas of Lavi and Swamy to reduce
designing a truthful mechanism without money to designing such a mechanism for
the fractional version of the problem, at a loss of a factor equal to the
integrality gap in the approximation ratio. We use this technique to obtain
strategyproof mechanisms with constant approximation ratios for these problems.
We then design an O(log n)-approximate strategyproof mechanism for the GAP by
reducing, with logarithmic loss in the approximation, to our solution for the
value-invariant GAP. Our technique may be of independent interest for designing
truthful mechanisms without money for other LP-based problems.Comment: Extended abstract appears in the 11th ACM Conference on Electronic
Commerce (EC), 201
Network-Based Vertex Dissolution
We introduce a graph-theoretic vertex dissolution model that applies to a
number of redistribution scenarios such as gerrymandering in political
districting or work balancing in an online situation. The central aspect of our
model is the deletion of certain vertices and the redistribution of their load
to neighboring vertices in a completely balanced way.
We investigate how the underlying graph structure, the knowledge of which
vertices should be deleted, and the relation between old and new vertex loads
influence the computational complexity of the underlying graph problems. Our
results establish a clear borderline between tractable and intractable cases.Comment: Version accepted at SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematic
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