72,959 research outputs found
Selfishness Level of Strategic Games
We introduce a new measure of the discrepancy in strategic games between the
social welfare in a Nash equilibrium and in a social optimum, that we call
selfishness level. It is the smallest fraction of the social welfare that needs
to be offered to each player to achieve that a social optimum is realized in a
pure Nash equilibrium. The selfishness level is unrelated to the price of
stability and the price of anarchy and is invariant under positive linear
transformations of the payoff functions. Also, it naturally applies to other
solution concepts and other forms of games.
We study the selfishness level of several well-known strategic games. This
allows us to quantify the implicit tension within a game between players'
individual interests and the impact of their decisions on the society as a
whole. Our analyses reveal that the selfishness level often provides a deeper
understanding of the characteristics of the underlying game that influence the
players' willingness to cooperate.
In particular, the selfishness level of finite ordinal potential games is
finite, while that of weakly acyclic games can be infinite. We derive explicit
bounds on the selfishness level of fair cost sharing games and linear
congestion games, which depend on specific parameters of the underlying game
but are independent of the number of players. Further, we show that the
selfishness level of the -players Prisoner's Dilemma is ,
where and are the benefit and cost for cooperation, respectively, that
of the -players public goods game is , where is
the public good multiplier, and that of the Traveler's Dilemma game is
, where is the bonus. Finally, the selfishness level of
Cournot competition (an example of an infinite ordinal potential game, Tragedy
of the Commons, and Bertrand competition is infinite.Comment: 34 page
A Defense of Egoism
This paper defends the strong thesis of ethical egoism, the view that self-interest is the exclusive standard of morally right action. The method of defense is that of reflective equilibrium, viz., back and forth reflection on intuitive judgments in particular cases and the principles that seem to explain our judgments, with the goal of aligning the two. The defense proceeds in three steps. First, I define what selfishness is and characterize what selfishness looks like in real life; an accurate depiction of selfishness will show that selfishness, at least generally, is morally attractive. Second, I defend the view that helping others and not helping others is morally right when and because doing so serves one’s self-interest. Third, I defend the same position in regard to harming and not harming others
Strategy intervention for the evolution of fairness
Masses of experiments have shown individual preference for fairness which
seems irrational. The reason behind it remains a focus for research. The effect
of spite (individuals are only concerned with their own relative standing) on
the evolution of fairness has attracted increasing attention from experiments,
but only has been implicitly studied in one evolutionary model. The model did
not involve high-offer rejections, which have been found in the form of
non-monotonic rejections (rejecting offers that are too high or too low) in
experiments. Here, we introduce a high offer and a non-monotonic rejection in
structured populations of finite size, and use strategy intervention to
explicitly study how spite influences the evolution of fairness: five
strategies are in sequence added into the competition of a fair strategy and a
selfish strategy. We find that spite promotes fairness, altruism inhibits
fairness, and the non-monotonic rejection can cause fairness to overcome
selfishness, which cannot happen without high-offer rejections. Particularly
for the group-structured population with seven discrete strategies, we
analytically study the effect of population size, mutation, and migration on
fairness, selfishness, altruism, and spite. A larger population size cannot
change the dominance of fairness, but it promotes altruism and inhibits
selfishness and spite. Intermediate mutation maximizes selfishness and
fairness, and minimizes spite; intermediate mutation maximizes altruism for
intermediate migration and minimizes altruism otherwise. The existence of
migration inhibits selfishness and fairness, and promotes altruism; sufficient
migration promotes spite. Our study may provide important insights into the
evolutionary origin of fairness.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures. Comments welcom
Selfishness in device-to-device communication underlaying cellular networks
In a device-to-device (D2D) communication underlaying cellular network, user equipments are required to operate cooperatively and unselfishly to transmit data as relays. However, most users behave in a more or less selfish way, which makes user selfishness a key factor that affects the performance of the whole communication system. We focus on the impact of node selfishness on D2D communications. By separating the user selfishness into two types in accordance with two D2D transmission modes – connected D2D transmission and opportunistic D2D transmission, we propose a time-varying graph model that characterizes the impacts of both individual and social selfishness on D2D communications. Simulation results obtained under the realistic networking settings indicate that the interaction between connected and opportunistic selfishness worsens the impairment caused by individual selfishness, while the harmful interaction caused by social selfishness can be alleviated
Enforcing efficient equilibria in network design games via subsidies
The efficient design of networks has been an important engineering task that
involves challenging combinatorial optimization problems. Typically, a network
designer has to select among several alternatives which links to establish so
that the resulting network satisfies a given set of connectivity requirements
and the cost of establishing the network links is as low as possible. The
Minimum Spanning Tree problem, which is well-understood, is a nice example.
In this paper, we consider the natural scenario in which the connectivity
requirements are posed by selfish users who have agreed to share the cost of
the network to be established according to a well-defined rule. The design
proposed by the network designer should now be consistent not only with the
connectivity requirements but also with the selfishness of the users.
Essentially, the users are players in a so-called network design game and the
network designer has to propose a design that is an equilibrium for this game.
As it is usually the case when selfishness comes into play, such equilibria may
be suboptimal. In this paper, we consider the following question: can the
network designer enforce particular designs as equilibria or guarantee that
efficient designs are consistent with users' selfishness by appropriately
subsidizing some of the network links? In an attempt to understand this
question, we formulate corresponding optimization problems and present positive
and negative results.Comment: 30 pages, 7 figure
The Examination of Teacher Candidates' Selfishness Levels Regarding Sportive Activity and Different Variables
The aim of this study is to the examination of teacher candidates' selfishness levels regarding sportive activity and different variables the study was conducted on 295 teacher candidates, 109 female and 186 male, who were educated in Erzurum Ataturk University, Kazim Karabekir faculty of education, in 2018-2019 academic year and voluntarily participated in the research. In the study, “The Selfishness Questionnaire: Egocentric, Adaptive, and Pathological Forms of Selfishness " was used which was developed by Adrian and Uh (2018) adapted to Turkish and analyzed for reliability and validity by Yılmaz (2018). Frequency analysis was used to determine demographic characteristics, and T test was used to examine the relationship between two independent variables and selfishness, analysis of variance was used to examine the relationship between more than two variables and selfishness. When the findings of the study were evaluated, it was seen that the pathological selfishness levels of female students were lower than male students. As a result of the findings, it is noticeable that the level of selfishness increases in parallel as the age level increases. The remarkable result here is, the level of selfishness increases in parallel as the time to do sportive activity increases. It is thought that, for students, sporting activity in their daily lives makes possible to increase their interaction with other students and therefore to focus on team or group goals rather than personal goals
The Economics of Corporate Tax Selfishness
This paper offers an economics perspective on corporate tax noncompliance. It first reviews what is known about the extent and nature of corporate tax noncompliance and the resources devoted to enforcement. It then addresses the supply of corporate noncompliance -- the industrial organization of the tax shelter industry -- as well as the demand for corporate tax noncompliance, focusing on how the standard Allingham-Sandmo approach needs to be modified when applied to public corporations. It then discusses the implications of a supply-and-demand approach for the analysis of the incidence and efficiency cost of corporate income taxation, and the very justification for a separate tax on corporation income. Along the way it addresses policy proposals aimed at increased disclosure of corporate tax activities to both the IRS and to the public.
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