ICTs connecting global citizens, global dialogue and global governance. A call for needful designs

Humankind is on the transition to a supra-system of humanity, according to which social relationships – that organise the common good – are re-organised such that global challenges are kept below the threshold of a self-inflicted breakdown. In order to succeed, three conditions are imperative: (1) Global governance needs a global conscience that orients towards the protection of the common good. (2) Such global governance needs a global dialogue on the state of the common good and the ways to proceed. (3) Such a global dialogue needs global citizens able to reflect upon the current state of the common good and the ways to proceed to desired states. Each of these imperatives is about a space of possibilities. Each space nests the following one such that they altogether form the scaffolding along which institutions can emerge that realise the imperatives when proper nuclei are introduced in those spaces. Such nuclei would already support each other. However, the clue is to further their integration by Information and Communication Technologies. An information platform shall be launched that could cover any task on any of the three levels, entangled with the articulation of cooperative action from the local to the global, based on the cybersubsidiarity model. This model is devised to ensure the percolation of meaningful information throughout the different organisational levels.2019-2

Conformity and reciprocity in the “exclusion game”: an experimental investigation

Sacconi and Grimalda (2002, 2005a, 2005b) introduced a model in which two basic motives to action are understood as different type of preferences and represented by a comprehensive utility function: the first is consequentialist motivation, whereas the second is a conditional willingness to conform with an ideal, or a moral principle, which they call a conformist, or ideal, motive to action. A moral ideal is meant as a normative principle of evaluation for collective modes of behaviours which provides agents with a ranking of states of affairs resulting from strategic interaction expressing a greater or lesser consistency with the ideal. The principle moreover is seen as resulting from a (possibly hypothetical) contract between the agents involved in the interaction in an ex-ante phase. Thus, the normative principle boils down to a social welfare function that measures the consistency of outcomes with the normative prescriptions provided by the ideal. Hence, agents understand their own and any other agent’s degree of conformity in terms of their contribution to carrying out the ideal given the others’ expected action, and a person’s own motivation to act in conformity with the principle increases with others’ (expected) conformity. In other words, individual conformity with the principle is conditional on others’ conformity with it, as perceived by the agent. This peculiar feature of reciprocity over others’ behaviour calls for an extension of the usual equipment of decision theory, which is provided by the theory of Psychological Games (Geanakoplos et al., 1989). In this paper we design an experiment for preliminary exploration of the empirical validity of the conformist preferences model, applying it to a simple non cooperative game(the Exclusion Game) meant as the problem of dividing a sum between two active players and a third, dummy player (passive beneficiary). Results are encouraging. Behaviours dramatically change passing from the simple exclusion game to a three steps game, in which once the players have first played the typical non cooperative exclusion game, and before playing it again, they participate in a middle phase, where they anonymously agree on a principle of division. Having agreed on a principle, even though this agreement does not implies reputation effects nor is externally enforceable, induces a substantial part of players - who acted selfishly in the first step - to conform to the principle in the third phase. The additional condition being that they believe the other players will also conform to the agreed principle (what here does happen, as a mater of fact). These results strictly accord with the prediction of the conformist preferences model, but cannot be accounted for by alternative theories of reciprocity

Connectivity and Cooperation

Abstract This article determines the influence of social connectivity on cooperation at the local and global levels. Connectivity greatly increases prospects of cooperation. Cooperation is an important part of negotiation. It is noted that understanding cooperation and its causes is vital for explaining and predicting a variety of negotiation issues and behavior such as the number of people involved, the level of information exchange, fairness, and partner selection. Connectivity in social networks appears to play a critical role in explaining cooperation. Cooperation was shown to be high and varied significantly across countries. The analysis reveals a positive effect of trust on cooperation. Connectivity is a key aspect for agents to reap the full benefits of negotiation. The effect of global identity strongly decreases that of the individual globalization index (IGI), thus supporting the idea that global identity mediates the effect of global connectivity on cooperation.</jats:p