Novel Hedonic Games and Stability Notions

We present here work on matching problems, namely hedonic games, also known as coalition formation games. We introduce two classes of hedonic games, Super Altruistic Hedonic Games (SAHGs) and Anchored Team Formation Games (ATFGs), and investigate the computational complexity of finding optimal partitions of agents into coalitions, or finding - or determining the existence of - stable coalition structures. We introduce a new stability notion for hedonic games and examine its relation to core and Nash stability for several classes of hedonic games

The Hedonistic Paradox: Is Homo Economicus Happier?

The “Hedonistic Paradox” states that homo economicus, or someone who seeks happiness for him- or herself, will not find it, but the person who helps others will. This study examines two questions in connection with happiness and generosity. First, do more generous people, as identified in dictator experiments, report on average greater happiness, or subjective well-being (SWB), as measured by responses to various questionnaires? Second, if the answer is affirmative, what is the causal relationship between generosity and happiness? We find a favorable correlation between generosity and happiness (i.e., SWB is directly related to several measures of happiness and inversely related to unhappiness) and examine various possible explanations, including that material well-being causes both happiness and generosity. The evidence from this experiment, however, indicates that a tertiary personality variable, sometimes called psychological well-being, is the primary cause of both happiness and greater generosity. In contrast to field studies, the experimental method of this inquiry permits anonymity measures designed to minimize subject misrepresentation of intrinsic generosity (e.g., due to social approval motives) and of actual happiness (e.g., because of social desirability biases) and produces a rich data set with multiple measures of subjective, psychological and material well-being. The results of this and other studies raise the question of whether greater attention should be paid to the potential benefits (beyond solely the material ones) of policies that promote charitable donations, volunteerism, service education, and, more generally, community involvement, political action, and social institutions that foster psychological well-being.Happiness; Subjective well-being; Altruism; Generosity; Psychological well-being; Eudaimonia

Values shaping consumer interactions on social commerce sites within game retail

The game industry has continued to grow for decades and the social interaction trend has been growing for years in gaming. In retail, the e-commerce companies have been extending the social interaction trend to the e-commerce platforms and turning the e-commerce into social commerce. Even though the social commerce and gaming have aroused the interest of the researchers earlier, social commerce interactions have not been studied from the value perspective and how the consumer interactions are shaped by the consumer values. In addition, game purchases have not been studied from a value co-creation perspective even though the gaming has been discussed from a value co-creation perspective. This study approaches the console game retail by exploring how the game retailers support value proposition in the social commerce, how do the consumers reflect on the use of social interaction possibilities on these sites and how do the values shape these interactions. Ethnographic study was conducted in spring 2017, where 5 game retail sites were analyzed, 12 Xbox and PlayStation console gamers were interviewed in Finland and in Sweden and one gaming group’s chat was analyzed as part of the data collection. Content analysis revealed the game retailers offering several possibilities for the gamers to interact on their site from user reviews to participation in the streaming services. The discovered themes, why consumers used interactions, were the aspect of discovery, the aspect of offering the helping hand and the aspect of enjoyment. The study revealed how gamers, who had the possibility to interact privately on social commerce sites seemed to experience utilitarian, hedonic, social and altruistic values and these values shaped their interaction culture. The consumers, who only participated in the public social commerce interactions, only referred to utilitarian and hedonic values as part of their interactions

Smiling is a Costly Signal of Cooperation Opportunities: Experimental Evidence from a Trust Game

We test the hypothesis that "genuine" or "convincing" smiling is a costly signal that has evolved to induce cooperation in situations requiring mutual trust. Potential trustees in a trust game made video clips for viewing by potential trusters before the latter decided whether to send them money. Ratings of the genuineness of smiles vary across clips; it is difficult to make convincing smiles to order. We argue that smiling convincingly is costly, because smiles from trustees playing for higher stakes are rated as significantly more convincing, so that rewards appear to induce effort. We show that it induces cooperation: smiles rated as more convincing strongly predict judgments about the trustworthiness of trustees, and willingness to send them money. Finally, we show that it is a honest signal: those smiling convincingly return more money on average to senders. Convincing smiles are to some extent a signal of the intrinsic character of trustees: less honest individuals find smiling convincingly more difficult. They are also informative about the greater amounts that trustees playing for higher stakes have available to share: it is harder to smile convincingly if you have less to offer.

Matching under Preferences

Matching theory studies how agents and/or objects from different sets can be matched with each other while taking agents\u2019 preferences into account. The theory originated in 1962 with a celebrated paper by David Gale and Lloyd Shapley (1962), in which they proposed the Stable Marriage Algorithm as a solution to the problem of two-sided matching. Since then, this theory has been successfully applied to many real-world problems such as matching students to universities, doctors to hospitals, kidney transplant patients to donors, and tenants to houses. This chapter will focus on algorithmic as well as strategic issues of matching theory. Many large-scale centralized allocation processes can be modelled by matching problems where agents have preferences over one another. For example, in China, over 10 million students apply for admission to higher education annually through a centralized process. The inputs to the matching scheme include the students\u2019 preferences over universities, and vice versa, and the capacities of each university. The task is to construct a matching that is in some sense optimal with respect to these inputs. Economists have long understood the problems with decentralized matching markets, which can suffer from such undesirable properties as unravelling, congestion and exploding offers (see Roth and Xing, 1994, for details). For centralized markets, constructing allocations by hand for large problem instances is clearly infeasible. Thus centralized mechanisms are required for automating the allocation process. Given the large number of agents typically involved, the computational efficiency of a mechanism's underlying algorithm is of paramount importance. Thus we seek polynomial-time algorithms for the underlying matching problems. Equally important are considerations of strategy: an agent (or a coalition of agents) may manipulate their input to the matching scheme (e.g., by misrepresenting their true preferences or underreporting their capacity) in order to try to improve their outcome. A desirable property of a mechanism is strategyproofness, which ensures that it is in the best interests of an agent to behave truthfully

Punish and Perish?

The evolution of large-scale cooperation among genetic strangers is a fundamental unanswered question in the social sciences. Behavioral economics has persuasively shown that so called ‘strong reciprocity’ plays a key role in accounting for the endogenous enforcement of cooperation. Insofar as strongly reciprocal players are willing to costly sanction defectors, cooperation flourishes. However, experimental evidence unambiguously indicates that not only defection and strong reciprocity, but also unconditional cooperation is a quantitatively important behavioral attitude. By referring to a prisoner’s dilemma framework where punishment (‘stick’) and rewarding (‘carrot’) options are available, here we show analytically that the presence of cooperators who don’t punish in the population makes altruistic punishment evolutionarily weak. We show that cooperation breaks down and strong reciprocity is maladaptive if costly punishment means ‘punishing defectors’ and, even more so, if it is coupled with costly rewarding of cooperators. In contrast, punishers don’t perish if cooperators, far from being rewarded, are sanctioned. These results, based on an extended notion of strong reciprocity, challenge evolutionary explanations of cooperation that overlook the ‘dark side’ of altruistic behavior.Cooperation, Strong Reciprocity, Altruistic Punishment, Altruistic Rewarding, Heterogeneous Types

Reconciling Justice and Pleasure in Epicurean Contractarianism

Epicurean contractarianism is an attempt to reconcile individualistic hedonism with a robust account of justice. The pursuit of pleasure and the requirements of justice, however, have seemed to be incompatible to many commentators, both ancient and modern. It is not clear how it is possible to reconcile hedonism with the demands of justice. Furthermore, it is not clear why, even if Epicurean contractarianism is possible, why it would be necessary for Epicureans to endorse a social contract. I argue here that Epicurean contractarianism is both possible and necessary once we understand Epicurean practical rationality in a new way. We are left with an appealing version of teleological, individualistic contractarianism that is significantly different from Hobbesian contractarianism

Sponsorship and advertising in sport: a study of consumers' attitude

Research question: Advertising has been considered a less efficient vehicle of marketing communication. One recent study refuted that unlike traditional adverting mediums, consumers' attitude towards advertising was rather favourable in sport. This study compared consumers’ attitudes between advertising and sponsorship in sport and examined the antecedents (beliefs) and consequence (purchase intentions) of attitude in advertising and sponsorship. Research methods: Data were collected from 324 consumers. For testing of psychometric properties of the measures, a confirmatory factor analysis and a multiple invariance test were employed. A paired t-test, structural equation modeling, and invariance tests were conducted to test the research hypotheses. Results and Findings: There was no significant difference in consumers’ attitudes between advertising and sponsorship which were both deemed favourable. The path analyses revealed two positive beliefs (product information and hedonism/pleasure) and one negative belief (falsity/no sense) as significant predictors of attitude in both models. Good for the economy was an additional significant predictor of attitude in advertising but it was not so in sponsorship. The strengths of the three path coefficients were statistically identical across the two models. Attitude was a significant indicator of purchase intentions in both models; however, the invariance test revealed that the path in adverting was statistically stronger than that in sponsorship. Implications: This study provides important knowledge about consumers’ cognitive structures that could explain their decision making processes. Sport marketers could develop their promotion strategies more successfully, conveying their intent in a manner consistent with positive beliefs and avoiding activating negative beliefs

Hedonic Seat Arrangement Problems

In this paper, we study a variant of hedonic games, called \textsc{Seat Arrangement}. The model is defined by a bijection from agents with preferences to vertices in a graph. The utility of an agent depends on the neighbors assigned in the graph. More precisely, it is the sum over all neighbors of the preferences that the agent has towards the agent assigned to the neighbor. We first consider the price of stability and fairness for different classes of preferences. In particular, we show that there is an instance such that the price of fairness ({\sf PoF}) is unbounded in general. Moreover, we show an upper bound $\tilde{d}(G)$ and an almost tight lower bound $\tilde{d}(G)-1/4$ of {\sf PoF}, where $\tilde{d}(G)$ is the average degree of an input graph. Then we investigate the computational complexity of problems to find certain ``good'' seat arrangements, say \textsc{Maximum Welfare Arrangement}, \textsc{Maximin Utility Arrangement}, \textsc{Stable Arrangement}, and \textsc{Envy-free Arrangement}. We give dichotomies of computational complexity of four \textsc{Seat Arrangement} problems from the perspective of the maximum order of connected components in an input graph. For the parameterized complexity, \textsc{Maximum Welfare Arrangement} can be solved in time $n^{O(\gamma)}$, while it cannot be solved in time $f(\gamma)^{o(\gamma)}$ under ETH, where $\gamma$ is the vertex cover number of an input graph. Moreover, we show that \textsc{Maximin Utility Arrangement} and \textsc{Envy-free Arrangement} are weakly NP-hard even on graphs of bounded vertex cover number. Finally, we prove that determining whether a stable arrangement can be obtained from a given arrangement by $k$ swaps is W[1]-hard when parameterized by $k+\gamma$, whereas it can be solved in time $n^{O(k)}$