Coexistence of cooperators and defectors in well mixed populations mediated by limiting resources

Traditionally, resource limitation in evolutionary game theory is assumed just to impose a constant population size. Here we show that resource limitations may generate dynamical payoffs able to alter an original prisoner's dilemma, and to allow for the stable coexistence between unconditional cooperators and defectors in well-mixed populations. This is a consequence of a self-organizing process that turns the interaction payoff matrix into evolutionary neutral, and represents a resource-based control mechanism preventing the spread of defectors. To our knowledge, this is the first example of coexistence in well-mixed populations with a game structure different from a snowdrift game

Non-Equilibrium Social Science and Policy

Between 2011 and 2014 the European Non-Equilibrium Social Science Project (NESS) investigated the place of equilibrium in the social sciences and policy. Orthodox economics is based on an equilibrium view of how the economy functions and does not offer a complete description of how the world operates. However, mainstream economics is not an empty box. Its fundamental insight, that people respond to incentives, may be the only universal law of behaviour in the social sciences. Only economics has used equilibrium as a primary driver of system behaviour, but economics has become much more empirical at the microlevel over the past two decades. This is due to two factors: advances in statistical theory enabling better estimates of policy consequences at the microlevel, and the rise of behavioural economics which looks at how people, firms and governments really do behave in practice. In this context, this chapter briefly reviews the contributions of this book across the social sciences and ends with a discussion of the research themes that act as a roadmap for further research. These include: realistic models of agent behaviour; multilevel systems; policy informatics; narratives and decision making under uncertainty; and validation of agent-based complex systems models

Urban semiosis: Creative industries and the clash of systems

© The Author(s) 2014. This article has two aims. The first is to make the case that the ‘universe of the mind’ imagined by Yuri Lotman may be considered as a foundational model for cultural evolution (population-wide, dynamic, autopoietic, self-organising adaptation to changing environments). The second aim is to take forward a model of culture derived from Lotman’s work – a model I call ‘the clash of systems’ – in order to apply it to creative industries research. Such a move has the salutary effect of putting the ‘universe of the mind’ literally in its place. That place, now, predominantly, is in the city. Thus, the article uses Lotman’s model of the semiosphere to link different complex systems, principally the semiosphere with that of the city, in order to explore the productive potential of encounters – clashes – between different systems. Applying these insights to the field of creative industries research, the article proposes that creative culture in the globalised, urban and web-connected era can be characterised as ‘urban semiosis’

The interpretations and uses of fitness landscapes in the social sciences

__Abstract__ This working paper precedes our full article entitled “The evolution of Wright’s (1932) adaptive field to contemporary interpretations and uses of fitness landscapes in the social sciences” as published in the journal Biology & Philosophy (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10539-014-9450-2). The working paper features an extended literature overview of the ways in which fitness landscapes have been interpreted and used in the social sciences, for which there was not enough space in the full article. The article features an in-depth philosophical discussion about the added value of the various ways in which fitness landscapes are used in the social sciences. This discussion is absent in the current working paper. Th

Complex type 4 structure changing dynamics of digital agents: Nash equilibria of a game with arms race in innovations

The new digital economy has renewed interest in how digital agents can innovate. This follows the legacy of John von Neumann dynamical systems theory on complex biological systems as computation. The Gödel-Turing-Post (GTP) logic is shown to be necessary to generate innovation based structure changing Type 4 dynamics of the Wolfram-Chomsky schema. Two syntactic procedures of GTP logic permit digital agents to exit from listable sets of digital technologies to produce novelty and surprises. The first is meta-analyses or offline simulations. The second is a fixed point with a two place encoding of negation or opposition, referred to as the Gödel sentence. It is postulated that in phenomena ranging from the genome to human proteanism, the Gödel sentence is a ubiquitous syntactic construction without which escape from hostile agents qua the Liar is impossible and digital agents become entrained within fixed repertoires. The only recursive best response function of a 2-person adversarial game that can implement strategic innovation in lock-step formation of an arms race is the productive function of the Emil Post [58] set theoretic proof of the Gödel incompleteness result. This overturns the view of game theorists that surprise and innovation cannot be a Nash equilibrium of a game

Managing the climate commons at the nexus of ecology, behaviour and economics

Sustainably managing coupled ecological–economic systems requires not only an understanding of the environmental factors that affect them, but also knowledge of the interactions and feedback cycles that operate between resource dynamics and activities attributable to human intervention. The socioeconomic dynamics, in turn, call for an investigation of the behavioural drivers behind human action. We argue that a multidisciplinary approach is needed in order to tackle the increasingly pressing and intertwined environmental challenges faced by modern societies. Academic contributions to climate change policy have been constrained by methodological and terminological differences, so we discuss how programmes aimed at cross-disciplinary education and involvement in governance may help to unlock scholars' potential to propose new solutions