An experimental study of network effects on coordination in asymmetric games

Network structure has often proven to be important in understanding the decision behavior of individuals or agents in different interdependent situations. Computational studies predict that network structure has a crucial influence on behavior in iterated 2 by 2 asymmetric ‘battle of the sexes’ games. We test such behavioral predictions in an experiment with 240 human subjects. We found that as expected the less ‘random’ the network structure, the better the experimental results are predictable by the computational models. In particular, there is an effect of network clustering on the heterogeneity of convergence behavior in the network. We also found that degree centrality and having an even degree are important predictors of the decision behavior of the subjects in the experiment. We thus find empirical validation of predictions made by computational models in a computerized experiment with human subjects

Leviathan and Automaton: Technology and Teleology in American Literature

This dissertation examines the relationship between time and technology in American literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It focuses principally on the work of Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, William Faulkner and Ralph Ellison, in the context of various historical and philosophical accounts of technology. It begins with the Leo Marx's analysis of American literature as being always concerned with the moment when the machine violently enters into the garden. The dominant American concept of technology asserts that technology is progress (which is not the same as endorsing technological progress); in Richard Heilbroner's classic formulation, "machines make history." This teleological drive within technology is ultimately eschatological: the world and the very self stand in peril of being turned into automatons. Whether or not the eschatos ends with the automation or liberation of the self, the internal teleological drive of technology threatens to end time, that is, the continuation of meaningful events, something which the mainstream of American literary criticism has failed to grasp, by focusing on technology as a contemporary crisis, rather than analyzing it as being constitutive of life itself. That is, attempts to resist technological eschatologies typically end up becoming technological eschatologies themselves, with Leo Marx serving as the perfect example. An important tradition within American literature, however, has articulated an anti-teleological, anti-eschatological account of technology, one which denies the reality of progress in favor of change. This tradition includes the works of Herman Melville (including Moby Dick, Typee, Omoo, the Confidence Man and Clarel) and Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man and the essays, collected and uncollected), with William Faulkner's works (especially Light in August, the Snopes books, Absalom, Absalom and Pylon) being more ambiguously included in this tradition. Lewis Mumford, in opposition to the mainstream of literary criticism, which has always endorsed an eschatological vision of technology, eventually approached Melville and Ellison's anti-eschatological position. These works present a vision which is a viable alternative to both "progressive" ideologies which advance the mechanization of humanity and reactionary anti-technological ideologies. The dissertation argues that the Ellisonian-Melvillean anti-eschatological vision of technology precedes and is related to the critiques of progress advanced by certain contemporary theorists of biology and historians of technology, including George Basilla, Arnold Pacey, Richard Lewontin and Stephen Gould, and that this unified rejection of the very idea of progress is intellectually necessary and politically desirable. The dissertation identifies and participates in a critique not of the desirability of American progress so much as of the reality of American progress, and of the complicity of American ideologies of progress with racist traditions

Granite and Rainbow: Queer Authority and Authorship in T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and Virginia Woolf

“Granite and Rainbow” argues that queerness is an essential condition for normative creativity to properly function in literary Modernism. Specifically, for the three modernist authors I explore in this project, queerness is at the heart of their literary performances: the private, bawdy, scintillatingly homoerotic Eliot feigning an impersonal, cerebral voice in public; the wounded, traumatized, feminine Yeats desiring for a compelling, masculine mask; and the scared and unsatisfiable Woolf whose strong desire for the maternal and a female tradition of writing is almost always cut short by her simultaneously antithetical craving for a male tradition of writing. This dissertation approaches this issue by attending to how queerness is figured and operative in their individual texts along the temporal or (and) spatial axis. Two chapters are allotted to each author in the order of Eliot, Yeats, and Woolf. The chapters on Eliot explain the private and public Eliot respectively. The Yeats chapters deal respectively with the poet’s early and later poems in terms of the plethora of ways his changing gender performances relate to the questions of queer temporality. The chapters on Woolf each focus on Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando, novels written around the same time, to trace how the novelist’s vacillation along the gender continuum comes across as issues with gender space and queer spatiality. Ultimately, this dissertation aims to show the similarities between what I see as queer in these modernist writers’ authority and authorship and the textual manifestations of queerness or queer time and space

The Model Prodigal: Jesuit School Plays and the Production of Devotion in the Spanish Empire, 1565-1611

In this dissertation I examine the relationship between early modern Jesuit theater and the construction of religious practice in the Spanish Empire. I focus upon plays that reinterpret the Biblical Parable of the Prodigal Son to argue that the Society of Jesus utilized the stage to acquire religious authority over the domestic sphere and to promote paradigms of masculinity that would halt imperial decline. Chapter One sets forth a theoretical framework for this discussion by employing performance theory to establish that theatrical productions often dialogue with the social issues of their day. It reviews the historical context of Jesuit theater to assert that these plays emphasized the benefits of sincere religious devotion, a goal important to the Society and to Tridentine Catholicism. The second chapter examines the prodigal figure\u27s journey in Pedro Pablo de Acevedo\u27s Comedia Caropo: Seville, 1565) and Comedia Filauto: Seville, 1565), Juan de Cigorondo\u27s Tragedia intitulada Oçio: Puebla, 1586), and Pedro de Salas\u27s Coloquio de la Escolástica triunfante y la nueva Babilonia: Soria, 1611). These plays characterize this journey as a spatialized rejection of virtuous paternal authority, after which the prodigals are adrift in a morally contested social sphere. The representation of public space as morally dangerous communicates a need for youth to obey pious elders. Onstage, this includes obedience to a counselor figure who mediates the son\u27s return home. In Chapter Three, I argue that the counselor\u27s performed moral superiority works to legitimate the Society\u27s religious authority over the domestic sphere. Chapters Three and Four then explore the corrective advice offered by counselor figures as they mediate the prodigals\u27 repentance. I conclude that Acevedo\u27s plays encourage noble youth to steward their patrimonies well by guarding them from lower-class parasites. Cigorondo\u27s work addresses the historical concern for idle Creole youth by depicting diligent study and economic productivity as requisites of male virtue in colonial New Spain. In Castile, Salas\u27s work critiques the decadence associated with Philip III\u27s court and posits membership in the Society of Jesus as a fulfilling alternative for youth seeking to realize a virtuous masculinity. By interrogating the construction of religious virtue in these distinct texts, I ascertained that this group of plays reworks the Parable of the Prodigal Son in order to address the immediate concerns of the Society of Jesus. Through the counselor figure these works strive to acquire clerical authority over the domestic sphere, and through the corrective advice offered to prodigal figures these plays seek to shape male behavior in a way that will advance the interests of both Church and Empire

Evolution of Prosocial Behavior through Preferential Detachment and Its Implications for Morality.

The current project introduces a general theory and supporting models that offer a plausible explanation and viable mechanism for generating and perpetuating prosocial behavior. The proposed mechanism is preferential detachment and the theory proposed is that agents utilizing preferential detachment will sort themselves into social arrangements such that the agents who contribute a benefit to the members of their group also do better for themselves in the long run. Agents can do this with minimal information about their environment, the other agents, the future, and with minimal cognitive/computational ability. The conclusion is that self-organizing into groups that maintain prosocial behaviors may be simpler and more robust than previously thought. The primary contribution of this research is that a single, simple mechanism operating in different contexts generates the conceptually distinct prosocial behaviors achieved by other models, and in a manner that is more amenable to evolutionary explanations. It also bears importantly on explanations of the evolution of our moral experiences and their connection with prosociality.Ph.D.Political Science and PhilosophyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91448/1/bramson_1.pd

Frictions and Flows: Affective Economies of Fire Dance in the Thai Tourism Industry

This dissertation examines Thai fire dance, a form of labour in the Thai tourist industry, as a platform through which fire dancers confront and negotiate the tensions of increasing tourism, marginalization, capitalist expansion and neoliberal ideologies. In particular, this research highlights the ways in which affective, embodied and spatialized practices in fire art communities form political interventions and group solidarities that are also intimately entangled in the reproduction and recreation of social hierarchies and unequal relations of power. While fire dance communities hold utopic potentials and moments of sharing across spectrums of social difference that allow for the reimagination of geopolitical, cultural and ethnonational boundaries, they are also spaces and practices fully implicated in the issues they seek to address. The affect born and danced into being in these communities is the nexus through which these complex negotiations are worked out through the body, and is the basis for micropolitical and messy solidarities to form in the midst of capitalist and neoliberal times and spaces

White moves first: unearthing white privilege in the modern board game.

This dissertation focuses on the design choices in the modern board game and argues that game designs emerge from and constitute dominant ideologies that endorse and secure white male superiority. This dissertation utilizes Michel Foucault’s archaeological method to “unearth” ideologies that cultural artifacts both emerge from and constitute. The project considers three central questions: 1) How does the locus of production and consumption impact the dominant ideology underlying game design? 2) How do design choices secure and constitute an ideology of white male dominance? 3) What impact does the normalization of white dominance have upon the broader community? This dissertation is organized around different analytical frameworks with each chapter focusing on one of these frameworks through several case studies. Chapter one introduces readers to the history of the modern board game from World War II to the present and offers a rubric for understanding the interrelated elements in game design. Chapter two focuses on how board games can present as discursive artifacts that reveal the ideological premises they emerge from and constitute. Chapter three inspects how board games reveal a dominant Eurocentrism that is demonstrated and shaped by geographical representation. Chapter four analyzes the role of racial representation for nonwhite characters and bodies to show a proclivity toward the diminished importance and debasement of nonwhite roles. Chapter five looks at the normalization and invisibility of white racial politics that maintains a power disequilibrium through space and representation. Chapter six aligns the endorsements of white dominance implied by game design with exclusionary community practices that secure barriers to play. Collectively, the privileging performances of board games frustrate the industry’s aims to amass a wider and more diverse population of players

Evolutionary games on graphs

Game theory is one of the key paradigms behind many scientific disciplines from biology to behavioral sciences to economics. In its evolutionary form and especially when the interacting agents are linked in a specific social network the underlying solution concepts and methods are very similar to those applied in non-equilibrium statistical physics. This review gives a tutorial-type overview of the field for physicists. The first three sections introduce the necessary background in classical and evolutionary game theory from the basic definitions to the most important results. The fourth section surveys the topological complications implied by non-mean-field-type social network structures in general. The last three sections discuss in detail the dynamic behavior of three prominent classes of models: the Prisoner's Dilemma, the Rock-Scissors-Paper game, and Competing Associations. The major theme of the review is in what sense and how the graph structure of interactions can modify and enrich the picture of long term behavioral patterns emerging in evolutionary games.Comment: Review, final version, 133 pages, 65 figure

The Environmental is Political: Exploring the Geography of Environmental Justice

The dissertation is a philosophical approach to politicizing place and space, or environments broadly construed, that is motivated by three questions. How can geography be employed to analyze the spatialities of environmental justice? How do spatial concepts inform understandings of environmentalism? And, how can geography help overcome social/political philosophy's redistribution-recognition debate in a way that accounts for the multiscalar dimensions of environmental justice? Accordingly, the dissertation's objective is threefold. First, I develop a critical geography framework that explores the spatialities of environmental injustices as they pertain to economic marginalization across spaces of inequitable distribution, cultural subordination in places of misrecognition, and political exclusion from public places of deliberation and policy. Place and space are relationally constituted by intricate networks of social relations, cultural practices, socioecological flows, and political-economic processes, and I contend that urban and natural environments are best represented as "places-in-space." Second, I argue that spatial frameworks and environmental discourses interlock because conceptualizations of place and space affect how environments are perceived, serve as framing devices to identify environmental issues, and entail different solutions to problems. In the midst of demonstrating how the racialization of place upholds inequitable distributions of pollution burdens, I introduce notions of "social location" and "white privilege" to account for the conflicting agendas of the mainstream environmental movement and the environmental justice movement, and consequent accusations of discriminatory environmentalism. Third, I outline a bivalent environmental justice theory that deals with the spatialities of environmental injustices. The theory synergizes distributive justice and the politics of social equality with recognition justice and the politics of identity and difference, therefore connecting cultural issues to a broader materialist analysis concerned with economic issues that extend across space. In doing so, I provide a justice framework that assesses critically the particularities of place and concurrently identifies commonalities to diverse social struggles, thus spatializing the geography of place-based political praxis