Intellectual Property and the Prisoner’s Dilemma: A Game Theory Justification of Copyrights, Patents, and Trade Secrets

In this article, I will offer an argument for the protection of intellectual property based on individual self-interest and prudence. In large part, this argument will parallel considerations that arise in a prisoner’s dilemma game. In brief, allowing content to be unprotected in terms of free access leads to a sub-optimal outcome where creation and innovation are suppressed. Adopting the institutions of copyright, patent, and trade secret is one way to avoid these sub-optimal results

The origins of fair play

This paper gives a brief overview of an evolutionary theory of fairness. The ideas are fleshed out in Binmore's book 'Natural Justice' (Oxford University Press, New York, 2005.), which is itself a condensed version of his earlier two-volume book 'Game Theory and the Social Contract' (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1994 and 1998)

The Social Brain

Editors\u27 Note: The economists\u27 traditional and convenient concept of human beings as rational actors who pursue self-interest has by now been thoroughly amended, if not debunked. But how the complicating factors, including gender, culture, emotion, and cognitive distortions, actually work in our brains has been elusive until more recently. Lately, however, neuroscience has begun to make inroads toward a better understanding of many of these factors. This chapter describes one large piece of the puzzle: the evolution of human beings\u27 brains as those of a highly interdependent, social species

Hirschman’s view of development, or the art of trespassing and self-subversion

This article analyses the work of Albert Hirschman from the standpoint of two basic concepts: trespassing and self-subversion. Hirschman turned these exercises into an art, pleading his case in a manner which combines curiosity and intellectual humility. In a world accustomed to think and think of itself through totalizing models, in a continent where so many ideological models which sought to open up (or rather, force open) the realities of countries were put together and taken apart, Hirschman’s works and intellectual attitude represent a healthy and beneficial invitation to take a different view. This is not his only merit, however. From Chile to Brazil, from Mexico to Argentina, he passed on his passion for the possible to more than a few admirers. In the last few years, a great many ministers, academics and leading members of international organizations have repeatedly praised his contributions. Likewise, many of the concepts developed by Hirschman –his “exit, voice and loyalty” triptych, the notion of the “tunnel effect”– and above all his propensity to think in terms of the possible and his efforts to trespass over and subvert theories (including his own), paradigms and models, and all the cubist and minimalist mental exercises that are constantly created and recreated, are healthy sources of inspiration and interpretation for rethinking the never-ending quest for development. Lastly, notions like community participation or social capital, which are now major subjects of discussion, can also be better appreciated, subverted and self-subverted in the light of Hirschman’s work.Trespassing;self-subversion;Chile;Mexico;Brazil;Argentina

Round-Preserving Parallel Composition of Probabilistic-Termination Protocols

An important benchmark for multi-party computation protocols (MPC) is their round complexity. For several important MPC tasks, (tight) lower bounds on the round complexity are known. However, for some of these tasks, such as broadcast, the lower bounds can be circumvented when the termination round of every party is not a priori known, and simultaneous termination is not guaranteed. Protocols with this property are called probabilistic-termination (PT) protocols. Running PT protocols in parallel affects the round complexity of the resulting protocol in somewhat unexpected ways. For instance, an execution of m protocols with constant expected round complexity might take O(log m) rounds to complete. In a seminal work, Ben-Or and El-Yaniv (Distributed Computing \u2703) developed a technique for parallel execution of arbitrarily many broadcast protocols, while preserving expected round complexity. More recently, Cohen et al. (CRYPTO \u2716) devised a framework for universal composition of PT protocols, and provided the first composable parallel-broadcast protocol with a simulation-based proof. These constructions crucially rely on the fact that broadcast is ``privacy free,\u27\u27 and do not generalize to arbitrary protocols in a straightforward way. This raises the question of whether it is possible to execute arbitrary PT protocols in parallel, without increasing the round complexity. In this paper we tackle this question and provide both feasibility and infeasibility results. We construct a round-preserving protocol compiler, secure against a dishonest minority of actively corrupted parties, that compiles arbitrary protocols into a protocol realizing their parallel composition, while having a black-box access to the underlying protocols. Furthermore, we prove that the same cannot be achieved, using known techniques, given only black-box access to the functionalities realized by the protocols, unless merely security against semi-honest corruptions is required, for which case we provide a protocol

Fairness with an Honest Minority and a Rational Majority

We provide a simple protocol for secret reconstruction in any threshold secret sharing scheme, and prove that it is fair when executed with many rational parties together with a small minority of honest parties. That is, all parties will learn the secret with high probability when the honest parties follow the protocol and the rational parties act in their own self-interest (as captured by a set-Nash analogue of trembling hand perfect equilibrium). The protocol only requires a standard (synchronous) broadcast channel, tolerates both early stopping and incorrectly computed messages, and only requires 2 rounds of communication. Previous protocols for this problem in the cryptographic or economic models have either required an honest majority, used strong communication channels that enable simultaneous exchange of information, or settled for approximate notions of security/equilibria. They all also required a nonconstant number of rounds of communication.Engineering and Applied Science

When Do People Trust Their Social Groups?

Trust facilitates cooperation and supports positive outcomes in social groups, including member satisfaction, information sharing, and task performance. Extensive prior research has examined individuals' general propensity to trust, as well as the factors that contribute to their trust in specific groups. Here, we build on past work to present a comprehensive framework for predicting trust in groups. By surveying 6,383 Facebook Groups users about their trust attitudes and examining aggregated behavioral and demographic data for these individuals, we show that (1) an individual's propensity to trust is associated with how they trust their groups, (2) smaller, closed, older, more exclusive, or more homogeneous groups are trusted more, and (3) a group's overall friendship-network structure and an individual's position within that structure can also predict trust. Last, we demonstrate how group trust predicts outcomes at both individual and group level such as the formation of new friendship ties.Comment: CHI 201