4,059 research outputs found
Nonlinear eco-evolutionary games with global environmental fluctuations and local environmental feedbacks
Environmental changes play a critical role in determining the evolution of
social dilemmas in many natural or social systems. Generally, the environmental
changes include two prominent aspects: the global time-dependent fluctuations
and the local strategy-dependent feedbacks. However, the impacts of these two
types of environmental changes have only been studied separately, a complete
picture of the environmental effects exerted by the combination of these two
aspects remains unclear. Here we develop a theoretical framework that
integrates group strategic behaviors with their general dynamic environments,
where the global environmental fluctuations are associated with a nonlinear
factor in public goods game and the local environmental feedbacks are described
by the `eco-evolutionary game'. We show how the coupled dynamics of local
game-environment evolution differs in static and dynamic global environments.
In particular, we find the emergence of cyclic evolutions of group cooperation
and local environment, which forms an interior irregular loop in the phase
plane, depending on the relative changing speed of both global and local
environments compared to the strategic change. Our results provide important
insights toward how diverse evolutionary outcomes could emerge from the
nonlinear interactions between strategies and the changing environments
Central governance based on monitoring and reporting solves the collective-risk social dilemma
Monitoring and reporting incorrect acts are pervasive for maintaining human
cooperation, but in theory it is unclear how they influence each other. To
explore their possible interactions we consider spatially structured population
where individuals face the collective-risk social dilemma. In our minimal model
cooperator players report defection according to the loss of their interests.
In parallel we assume a monitoring institution that monitors all group member
and identifies wrong behavior with a certain probability. In response to these
feedbacks a sanctioning institution develops punishment schemes by imposing
fines on related defector players stochastically. By means of Monte Carlo
simulations, we find that the introduction of monitoring and reporting
mechanisms can greatly promote the evolution of cooperation and there exists a
sudden change of the cooperation level by varying model parameters, which can
lead to an outbreak of cooperation for solving the collective-risk social
dilemma.Comment: 6 figure
Cooperator driven oscillation in a time-delayed feedback-evolving game
Considering feedback of collective actions of cooperation on common resources
has vital importance to reach sustainability. But such efforts may have not
immediate consequence on the state of environment and it is unclear how they
influence the strategic and environmental dynamics with feedbacks. To address
this issue, we construct a feedback-evolving game model in which we consider
the growth capacity of resources and the punishment efficiency on defectors who
do not provide returns to the environment. Importantly, we further assume a
delay in adopting the contribution of cooperative individuals to environmental
change in our model. We find that when this contribution amount from
cooperators' endowment is fixed, the time delay has no particular consequence
on the coevolutionary dynamics. However, when the return is proportional to
their endowment, then the time delay can induce periodic oscillatory dynamics
of cooperation level and environment. Our work reveals the potential effects of
time delay of cooperative actions on the coevolutionary dynamics in strategic
interactions with environmental feedback
Complexity Theory, Adaptation, and Administrative Law
Recently, commentators have applied insights from complexity theory to legal analysis generally and to administrative law in particular. This Article focuses on one of the central problems that complexity. theory addresses, the importance and mechanisms of adaptation within complex systems. In Part I, the Article uses three features of complex adaptive systems-emergence from self-assembly, nonlinearity, and sensitivity to initial conditions-and explores the extent to which they may add value as a matter of positive analysis to the understanding of change within legal systems. In Part H, the Article focuses on three normative claims in public law scholarship that depend explicitly or implicitly on notions of adaptation: that states offer advantages over the federal government because experimentation can make them more adaptive, that federal agencies should themselves become more experimentalist using the tool of adaptive management, and that administrative agencies shou Id adopt collaborative mechanisms in policymaking. Using two analytic tools found in the complexity literature, the genetic algorithm and evolutionary game theory, the Article tests the extent to which these three normative claims are borne out
Large scale and information effects on cooperation in public good games
The problem of public good provision is central in economics and touches upon many challenging societal issues, ranging from climate change mitigation to vaccination schemes. However, results which are supposed to be applied to a societal scale have only been obtained with small groups of people, with a maximum group size of 100 being reported in the literature. This work takes this research to a new level by carrying out and analysing experiments on public good games with up to 1000 simultaneous players. The experiments are carried out via an online protocol involving daily decisions for extended periods. Our results show that within those limits, participants' behaviour and collective outcomes in very large groups are qualitatively like those in smaller ones. On the other hand, large groups imply the difficulty of conveying information on others' choices to the participants. We thus consider different information conditions and show that they have a drastic effect on subjects' contributions. We also classify the individual decisions and find that they can be described by a moderate number of types. Our findings allow to extend the conclusions of smaller experiments to larger settings and are therefore a relevant step forward towards the understanding of human behaviour and the organisation of our society.A.A. gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Ministerio de EconomÃa y Competitividad of Spain under grant no. FJCI-2016-28276. This work was also supported by the EU through FET-Proactive Project DOLFINS (contract no. 640772, A.S.) and FET-Open Project IBSEN (contract no. 662725, A.S.), and by the Ministerio de EconomÃa y Competitividad of Spain (grant no. FIS2015-64349-P, J.C. and A.S.) (MINECO/FEDER, UE), and by Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades/FEDER (Spain/UE) through grant PGC2018-098186-B-I00 (BASIC)
A question of balance : accountability and autonomy in twenty-first century English state schools
Accountability has always been important in taxpayer-funded English state schools. This accountability has become more complex over the past 30 years as policymakers have introduced market forces into public education.The Education Reform Act, (legislation.gov.uk, 1988) and subsequent legislation changed schools from being’ administrative units of their LEA’ (Department for Education [DfE], 1992: 7) into autonomous, self-managing institutions. In the former, head teachers were managers ensuring compliance with the implementation of national or local policy directives whilst the leaders of autonomous schools are able to make their own decisions about an increasing range of management functions, including school self-improvement (DfE, 2010a:73).However, despite these advances, school leaders were not able to make their own decisions about how their school was to be held accountable. The imposition of a rigorous national inspection framework (Education [Schools] Act, 1992) meant that schools were held accountable for the standards required by government. This school and system-focused approach relied on intervention to bring about the rapid improvement needed in underperforming schools. This thesis examines the fitness for purpose of this regime for successful schools that have earned their autonomy.This research uses a case study of one successful secondary school’s attempt to introduce the balanced scorecard (BSC), which is an alternative accountability methodology not commonly used in schools, although, it is popular in the business world. The research identifies that governors with experience of using the balanced scorecard(BSC) in their places of work successfully modified it for use in a school setting. The findings also indicate that training in a wider range of accountability approaches, including those from outside education, would provide school leaders with a wider range of accountability tools from which to select the one best suited to their institution
Seasonal payoff variations and the evolution of cooperation in social dilemmas
Varying environmental conditions affect relations between interacting
individuals in social dilemmas, thus affecting also the evolution of
cooperation. Oftentimes these environmental variations are seasonal and can
therefore be mathematically described as periodic changes. Accordingly, we here
study how periodic shifts between different manifestations of social dilemmas
affect cooperation. We observe a non-trivial interplay between the inherent
spatiotemporal dynamics that characterizes the spreading of cooperation in a
particular social dilemma type and the frequency of payoff changes. In
particular, we show that periodic changes between two available games with
global ordering best be fast, while periodic changes between global and local
ordering games best be slow for cooperation to thrive. We also show that the
frequency of periodic changes between two local ordering social dilemmas is
irrelevant, because then the process is fast and simply the average cooperation
level of the two is returned. The structure of the interaction network plays an
important role too in that lattices promote local ordering, whilst random
graphs hinder the formation of compact cooperative clusters. Conversely, for
local ordering the regular structure of the interaction network is only
marginally relevant as role-separating checkerboard patterns do not rely on
long-range order.Comment: 9 two-column pages, 6 figures; accepted for publication in Scientific
Report
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