Billiards and Brains: Cognitive Ability and Behavior in a p-Beauty Contest

"Beauty contests" are well-studied, dominance-solvable games that generate two interesting results. First, most behavior does not conform to the unique Nash equilibrium. Second, there is considerable unexplained heterogeneity in behavior. In this work, we evaluate the relationship between beauty contest behavior and cognitive ability. We find that subjects with high cognitive ability exhibit behavior that is closer to the Nash equlibrium. We examine this finding through the prism of economic and biological theory.beauty contest; rationality; cognitive ability; Nash equlibrium

Spartan Daily, August 29, 1983

Volume 81, Issue 2https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/7052/thumbnail.jp

Spartan Daily, April 26, 1972

Volume 59, Issue 105https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/5618/thumbnail.jp

Mortal Kombat: The Effect of Violent Videogame Play on Males' Hostility and Cardiovascular Responding

We examined cardiovascular (CV) reactivity and hostility among 30 male undergraduates after either nonviolent (billiards) or 1 of 2 levels of violent videogame play. Violence varied among 2 versions of the game Mortal Kombat (MKl = less violent, MK2 = more violent)-all other factors (graphics, sound) were held equal. As expected, increased game violence elicited greater CV reactivity and higher scores on hostility measures. Subjects who played MK1 or MK2 had higher heart rate reactivity than those who played billiards. Subjects who played MK2 showed greater systolic blood pressure reactivity than those who played MKl or billiards. Finally, subjects who played MK2 scored higher on the hostility measures than those who played MKl, who in turn scored higher than those who played billiards. These results indicate that the level of videogame violence, not just violence per se, should be of concern to consumers

Pedestrians moving in dark: Balancing measures and playing games on lattices

We present two conceptually new modeling approaches aimed at describing the motion of pedestrians in obscured corridors: * a Becker-D\"{o}ring-type dynamics * a probabilistic cellular automaton model. In both models the group formation is affected by a threshold. The pedestrians are supposed to have very limited knowledge about their current position and their neighborhood; they can form groups up to a certain size and they can leave them. Their main goal is to find the exit of the corridor. Although being of mathematically different character, the discussion of both models shows that it seems to be a disadvantage for the individual to adhere to larger groups. We illustrate this effect numerically by solving both model systems. Finally we list some of our main open questions and conjectures