The logic of forbidden colours

The purpose of this paper is twofold: (1) to clarify Ludwig Wittgenstein’s thesis that colours possess logical structures, focusing on his ‘puzzle proposition’ that “there can be a bluish green but not a reddish green”, (2) to compare modeltheoretical and gametheoretical approaches to the colour exclusion problem. What is gained, then, is a new gametheoretical framework for the logic of ‘forbidden’ (e.g., reddish green and bluish yellow) colours. My larger aim is to discuss phenomenological principles of the demarcation of the bounds of logic as formal ontology of abstract objects

Maxmin computation and optimal correlation in repeated games with signals

Le maxmin pour une certaine classe de jeux répétés à observation imparfaite est obtenu comme la solution d'un problème d'optimisation défini sur l'ensemble des distributions de probabilités sous contraintes d'entropie. Cette article offre une méthode pour résoudre un tel problème dans le cas d\\ún jeu à trois joueurs où chaque joueur dispose de deux actions à chaque étape.Jeu répété à observation imparfaite;Maxmin;Entropie;Optimisation

Evolutionary Poisson Games for Controlling Large Population Behaviors

Emerging applications in engineering such as crowd-sourcing and (mis)information propagation involve a large population of heterogeneous users or agents in a complex network who strategically make dynamic decisions. In this work, we establish an evolutionary Poisson game framework to capture the random, dynamic and heterogeneous interactions of agents in a holistic fashion, and design mechanisms to control their behaviors to achieve a system-wide objective. We use the antivirus protection challenge in cyber security to motivate the framework, where each user in the network can choose whether or not to adopt the software. We introduce the notion of evolutionary Poisson stable equilibrium for the game, and show its existence and uniqueness. Online algorithms are developed using the techniques of stochastic approximation coupled with the population dynamics, and they are shown to converge to the optimal solution of the controller problem. Numerical examples are used to illustrate and corroborate our results

Law as a Precondition for Religious Freedom

Throughout history, people have suffered for the sake of their religion. Religious organisations have been forbidden or governments have tightly controlled them. The constitutional protection of freedom of religion is a necessity. In a religiously pluralistic world, granting the guarantee is also in the state’s best interest. Yet religions have been hesitant to embrace the guarantee. It implies secularism. Religious freedom is balanced against other freedoms, and against legitimate state interests. Government is faced with social forces that are grounded in eternity and that cannot be proven to be wrong. Seemingly the constitutional protection is a threatening for religions and the state as it is beneficial. Yet the essentially pragmatic nature of law overcomes the tragic dilemma – albeit only at the price of acknowledging that jurisprudence is policy-making.religions freedom, neutrality principle, human rights, pragmatism, proportionality principle, balancing, margin of appreciation, regulability

Continuois Time Contests

This paper introduces a contest model in which each player decides when to stop a privately observed Brownian motion with drift and incurs costs depending on his stopping time. The player who stops his process at the highest value wins a prize. Applications of the model include procurement contests and competitions for grants. We prove existence and uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium outcome, even if players have to choose bounded stopping times. We derive the equilibrium distribution in closed form. If the noise vanishes, the equilibrium outcome converges to - and thus selects - the symmetric equilibrium outcome of an all-pay auction. For two players and constant costs, each player’s profits increase if costs for both players increase, variance increases, or drift decreases. Intuitively, patience becomes a more important factor for contest success, which reduces informational rents

Chance in a Created World: How to Avoid Common Misunderstandings about Divine Action

In the article ”Against Physicalism-plus-God: How Creation Accounts for Divine Action in the World’, I defined a framework which allows us to make some progress in our understanding of how God acts in the world. In the present article, I apply this framework to the specific question of chance events. I show that chance does not provide an explanation for special divine action. Nevertheless, chance does not hamper God’s ability to act in the world, and creation provides a framework for the understanding of chance, which is akin to what we see in modern science

Dynamic Properties of the Nash Equilibrium

In this paper the authors examine the games with well-defined reaction functions. The focus is on the stability property of the Nash equilibria, i.e. the convergency in the strategy profile space to a Nash equilibrium when, beginning with some initial strategy choices in a neighborhood, players take turn to make improvements. Some interesting propositions on the dynamic properties have been established, which offer a kind of explanation as to why in general the outcomes of games and the economic dynamic process can be rather diversified

Towards a Unity of the Human Behavioral Sciences

Despite their distinct objects of study, the human behavioral sciences all include models of individual human behavior. Unity in the behavioral sciences requires that there be a common underlying model of individual human behavior, specialized and enriched to meet the particular needs of each discipline. Such unity does not exist, and cannot be easily attained, since the various disciplines have incompatible models and disparate research methodologies. Yet recent theoretical and empirical developments have created the conditions for unity in the behavioral sciences, incorporating core principles from all fields, and based upon theoretical tools (game theory and the rational actor model) and data gathering techniques (experimental games in laboratory and field) that transcend disciplinary boundaries. This paper sketches a set of principles aimed at fostering such a unity. They include: (a) evolutionary and behavioral game theory provides a transdisciplinary lexicon for communication and modelbuilding; (b) the rational actor model, rooted in biology but developed in economic theory, applies to all the human behavioral disciplines. This model treats actions as instrumental towards satisfying preferences. However, the content of preferences must be empirically determined. Moreover, the rational actor model is based on a notion of preference consistency that is not universally satisfied, so its range of applicability must also be empirically determined; (c) controlled experiments have been underutilized in most behavioral disciplines. Game theory and the rational actor model can be used as the basis for formulating, deploying, and analyzing data generated from controlled experiments with human subjects.A pesar de que tienen objetos de estudio distintos, todas las ciencias del comportamiento humano cuentan con modelos de la conducta humana individual. La unidad de tales ciencias requiere un modelo común subyacente de comportamiento humano individual, especificado y enriquecido para satisfacer las necesidades particulares de cada disciplina. No existe tal unidad, y no puede ser fácilmente alcanzada, dado que que las diversas disciplinas tienen modelos incompatibles y metodologías de investigación dispares. Con todo, recientes desarrollos teóricos y empíricos han creado las condiciones para la unidad de las ciencias del comportamiento, incorporando principios centrales en todos los campos, y basándose en herramientas teóricas (como la teoría de juegos y el modelo de actor racional) y técnicas de recogida de datos (como los juegos experimentales de laboratorio y sobre el terreno) que transcienden las fronteras disciplinarias. Tales desarrollos incluyen: (a) la teoría de juegos evolucionaria y conductual, que proporciona un léxico transdisciplinar para la comunicación y la construcción de modelos; (b) el modelo de actor racional, anclado en la biología pero desarrollado por la teoría económica, que se aplica en todas las disciplinas del comportamiento humano. Este modelo trata las acciones como instrumentales, dirigidas a la satisfacción de las preferencias. Sin embargo, el contenido de las preferencias debe ser empíricamente determinado. Además, el modelo de actor racional está basado en una noción de la consistencia de las preferencias que no se satisface universalmente, de modo que su rango de aplicabillidad debe determinarse también empíricamente; (c) los experimentos controlados, que han sido infrautilizados en la mayoría de las ciencias del comportamiento. La teoría de juegos y el modelo de actor racional pueden ser usados como base para formular, desplegar y analizar datos generados a partir de experimentos controlados con sujetos humanos