28,523 research outputs found
Antisocial pool rewarding does not deter public cooperation
Rewarding cooperation is in many ways expected behaviour from social players.
However, strategies that promote antisocial behaviour are also surprisingly
common, not just in human societies, but also among eusocial insects and
bacteria. Examples include sanctioning of individuals who behave prosocially,
or rewarding of freeriders who do not contribute to collective enterprises. We
therefore study the public goods game with antisocial and prosocial pool
rewarding in order to determine the potential negative consequences on the
effectiveness of positive incentives to promote cooperation. Contrary to a
naive expectation, we show that the ability of defectors to distribute rewards
to their like does not deter public cooperation as long as cooperators are able
to do the same. Even in the presence of antisocial rewarding the spatial
selection for cooperation in evolutionary social dilemmas is enhanced. Since
the administration of rewards to either strategy requires a considerable degree
of aggregation, cooperators can enjoy the benefits of their prosocial
contributions as well as the corresponding rewards. Defectors when aggregated,
on the other hand, can enjoy antisocial rewards, but due to their lack of
contributions to the public good they ultimately succumb to their inherent
inability to secure a sustainable future. Strategies that facilitate the
aggregation of akin players, even if they seek to promote antisocial behaviour,
thus always enhance the long-term benefits of cooperation.Comment: 9 two-column pages, 5 figures; accepted for publication in
Proceedings of the Royal Society
An Integrated Assessment Framework for Water Resources Management: A DSS Tool and a Pilot Study Application
Decision making for the management of water resources is a complex and difficult task. This is due to the complex socio-economic system that involves a large number of interest groups pursuing multiple and conflicting objectives, within an often intricate legislative framework. Several Decision Support Systems have been developed but very few have indeed proved to be effective and truly operational. MULINO (Multisectoral, Integrated and Operational Decision Support System for Sustainable Use of Water Resources at the Catchment Scale) is a project funded under the Fifth Framework Programme of the European Research and the key action line dedicated to operational management schemes and decision support system for sustainable use of water resources. The MULINO DSS (mDSS) integrates hydrological models with multi-criteria decision methods and adopts the DPSIR (Driving Force â Pressure â State â Impact â Response) framework developed by the European Environment Agency. The DPSIR was converted from a static reporting scheme into a dynamic framework for integrated assessment modelling (IAM) and multi-criteria evaluation procedures. This paper presents the methodological framework and the intermediate results of the mDSS tool through its application in a pilot study area located in the Watershed of the Lagoon of Venice.Integrated water resources management, Spatial decision-making, Decision support system, Catchment, Environmental modelling
Water and molecular chaperones act as weak links of protein folding networks: energy landscape and punctuated equilibrium changes point towards a game theory of proteins
Water molecules and molecular chaperones efficiently help the protein folding
process. Here we describe their action in the context of the energy and
topological networks of proteins. In energy terms water and chaperones were
suggested to decrease the activation energy between various local energy minima
smoothing the energy landscape, rescuing misfolded proteins from conformational
traps and stabilizing their native structure. In kinetic terms water and
chaperones may make the punctuated equilibrium of conformational changes less
punctuated and help protein relaxation. Finally, water and chaperones may help
the convergence of multiple energy landscapes during protein-macromolecule
interactions. We also discuss the possibility of the introduction of protein
games to narrow the multitude of the energy landscapes when a protein binds to
another macromolecule. Both water and chaperones provide a diffuse set of
rapidly fluctuating weak links (low affinity and low probability interactions),
which allow the generalization of all these statements to a multitude of
networks.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figur
Collective intelligence: aggregation of information from neighbors in a guessing game
Complex systems show the capacity to aggregate information and to display
coordinated activity. In the case of social systems the interaction of
different individuals leads to the emergence of norms, trends in political
positions, opinions, cultural traits, and even scientific progress. Examples of
collective behavior can be observed in activities like the Wikipedia and Linux,
where individuals aggregate their knowledge for the benefit of the community,
and citizen science, where the potential of collectives to solve complex
problems is exploited. Here, we conducted an online experiment to investigate
the performance of a collective when solving a guessing problem in which each
actor is endowed with partial information and placed as the nodes of an
interaction network. We measure the performance of the collective in terms of
the temporal evolution of the accuracy, finding no statistical difference in
the performance for two classes of networks, regular lattices and random
networks. We also determine that a Bayesian description captures the behavior
pattern the individuals follow in aggregating information from neighbors to
make decisions. In comparison with other simple decision models, the strategy
followed by the players reveals a suboptimal performance of the collective. Our
contribution provides the basis for the micro-macro connection between
individual based descriptions and collective phenomena.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figure
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