Non-organized boycott : alliance advantage and free riding incentives in uneven wars of attrition

We study non-organized boycott activities. We develop a boycott model where multiple consumers on the demand side fight against a misbehaved monopolist on the supply side. The goal of the boycott is to force the firm that lacks corporate social responsibility to change its behavior, for example, abandon polluting production technology towards environmentally friendly actions. We analyze consumers’ and firm’s incentives and equilibrium strategies. Our paper describes the difficulty of winning a non-organized boycott in reality. We find that consumers’ free riding incentives limit the real boycott power even when the benefits to free ride is small. The larger the market the firm serves, the more likely an individual consumer would stop boycotting (who acts as a strict environmentalist), which leaves fewer boycotters remaining in the costly conflict (who act as loyal supporters of the product). On the other hand, we show that the market size does not significantly affect the firm’s strategies. For a big firm, the consumer boycott will surely be effective, that is, lead to non-zero boycotter participation, but hardly successful, that is, not lead to the firm’s cessation of misbehavior.Peer reviewe

Optimally Stubborn

I consider a bargaining game with two types of players – rational and stubborn. Rational players choose demands at each point in time. Stubborn players are restricted to choose from the set of “insistent” strategies that always make the same demand and never accept anything less. However, their initial choice of demand is unrestricted. I characterize the equilibria of this game. I show that while pooling equilibria exist, fully separating equilibria do not. Relative to the case with exogenous behavioral types, strong behavioral predictions emerge: in the limit, players randomize over at most two demands. However, unlike in a world with exogenous types, there is Folk-theorem-like payoff multiplicity

Chris Cannings: A Life in Games

Chris Cannings was one of the pioneers of evolutionary game theory. His early work was inspired by the formulations of John Maynard Smith, Geoff Parker and Geoff Price; Chris recognized the need for a strong mathematical foundation both to validate stated results and to give a basis for extensions of the models. He was responsible for fundamental results on matrix games, as well as much of the theory of the important war of attrition game, patterns of evolutionarily stable strategies, multiplayer games and games on networks. In this paper we describe his work, key insights and their influence on research by others in this increasingly important field. Chris made substantial contributions to other areas such as population genetics and segregation analysis, but it was to games that he always returned. This review is written by three of his students from different stages of his career

Sequential bargaining with pure common values

We study the alternating-offers bargaining problem of assigning an indivisible and commonly valued object to one of two players in return for some payment among players. The players are asymmetrically informed about the object’s value and have veto power over any settlement. There is no depreciation during the bargaining process which involves signalling of private information. We characterise the perfect Bayesian equilibrium of this game which is essentially unique if offers are required to be strictly increasing. Equilibrium agreement is reached gradually and nondeterministically. The better informed player obtains a rent

Evolutionary Multiplayer Games

Evolutionary game theory has become one of the most diverse and far reaching theories in biology. Applications of this theory range from cell dynamics to social evolution. However, many applications make it clear that inherent non-linearities of natural systems need to be taken into account. One way of introducing such non-linearities into evolutionary games is by the inclusion of multiple players. An example is of social dilemmas, where group benefits could e.g.\ increase less than linear with the number of cooperators. Such multiplayer games can be introduced in all the fields where evolutionary game theory is already well established. However, the inclusion of non-linearities can help to advance the analysis of systems which are known to be complex, e.g. in the case of non-Mendelian inheritance. We review the diachronic theory and applications of multiplayer evolutionary games and present the current state of the field. Our aim is a summary of the theoretical results from well-mixed populations in infinite as well as finite populations. We also discuss examples from three fields where the theory has been successfully applied, ecology, social sciences and population genetics. In closing, we probe certain future directions which can be explored using the complexity of multiplayer games while preserving the promise of simplicity of evolutionary games.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures, review pape

Puhekaverina botti : viestivä tekoäly inhimillistettynä vuorovaikutuskumppanina

Titel på engelska: 'Bot as a Chat Buddy – Communicative AI as an Anthropomorphized Interactive Companion'.Viestivät tekoälyt eli luonnollisella kielellä käytävään keskusteluun kykenevät algoritmit ovat yhä tyypillisempiä vuorovaikutuskumppaneita erilaisilla teknologisilla alustoilla. Yksi tyypillinen viestivän tekoälyn muoto on botti: automaattinen ohjelma, joka käyttää verkkopalvelun käyttäjätiliä tavallisen käyttäjän tavoin ja suorittaa yksinkertaisia toimintoja tai viestii. Tyypillisesti botit tavalla tai toisella pyrkivät näyttäytymään ihmiskäyttäjinä, tai ainakin niille ohjelmoidaan ja suunnitellaan ihmisenkaltaisia piirteitä. Artikkeli tarkastelee bottien roolia vuorovaikutuskumppaneina sisäisessä ja julkisessa mediatilassa kytkeytymällä tuoreeseen ihmis-koneviestinnän tutkimusalaan. Keskitymme kahteen empiiriseen tapaukseen: mediaorganisaation sisäisellä alustalla viestivään SlackBot-bottiin sekä Fazerin mainoskampanjan osana toimineeseen LoveBot Blue -bottiin, joka puuttui vihapuheeseen verkossa. Artikkelin johtopäätöksenä toteamme, että bottien inhimillistäminen on tärkeä osa niiden toimivuutta sosiaalisissa ja vuorovaikutuksellisissa tilanteissa. Boteille osoitetaan toimijuutta erityisesti niiden kanssa viestivien ihmistoimijoiden vuorovaikutuksen kautta. Tuloksemme todentavat ihmis-koneviestinnän kirjallisuudessa esitettyä tarvetta uudelleenmääritellä viestinnän, vuorovaikutuksen ja toimijuuden kysymyksiä viestivien tekoälyjen kontekstissa.Peer reviewe