In Broad Daylight: Fuller Information and Higher-Order Punishment Opportunities Can Promote Cooperation

The expectation that non-cooperators will be punished can help to sustain cooperation, but there are competing claims about whether opportunities to engage in higher-order punishment (punishing punishment or failure to punish) help or undermine cooperation in social dilemmas. Varying treatments of a voluntary contributions experiment, we find that availability of higher-order punishment opportunities increases cooperation and efficiency when subjects have full information on the pattern of punishing and its history, when any subject can punish any other, and when the numbers of punishment and of contribution stages are not too unequal

Play it Again: Partner Choice, Reputation Building and Learning from Finitely-Repeated Dilemma Games

Often the fuller the reputational record people's actions generate, the greater their incentive to earn a reputation for cooperation. However, inability to “wipe clean” one's past record might trap some agents who initially underappreciate reputation's value in a cycle of bad behaviour, whereas a clean slate could have been followed by their “reforming” themselves. In a laboratory experiment, we investigate what subjects learn from playing a finitely repeated dilemma game with endogenous, symmetric partner choice. We find that with a high cooperation premium and good information, investment in cooperative reputation grows following exogenous restarts, although earlier end-game behaviours are observed

Pseudorandom Linear Codes are List Decodable to Capacity

We introduce a novel family of expander-based error correcting codes. These codes can be sampled with randomness linear in the block-length, and achieve list-decoding capacity (among other local properties). Our expander-based codes can be made starting from any family of sufficiently low-bias codes, and as a consequence, we give the first construction of a family of algebraic codes that can be sampled with linear randomness and achieve list-decoding capacity. We achieve this by introducing the notion of a pseudorandom puncturing of a code, where we select $n$ indices of a base code $C\subset \mathbb{F}_q^m$ via an expander random walk on a graph on $[m]$. Concretely, whereas a random linear code (i.e. a truly random puncturing of the Hadamard code) requires $O(n^2)$ random bits to sample, we sample a pseudorandom linear code with $O(n)$ random bits. We show that pseudorandom puncturings satisfy several desirable properties exhibited by truly random puncturings. In particular, we extend a result of (Guruswami Mosheiff FOCS 2022) and show that a pseudorandom puncturing of a small-bias code satisfies the same local properties as a random linear code with high probability. As a further application of our techniques, we also show that pseudorandom puncturings of Reed Solomon codes are list-recoverable beyond the Johnson bound, extending a result of (Lund Potukuchi RANDOM 2020). We do this by instead analyzing properties of codes with large distance, and show that pseudorandom puncturings still work well in this regime.Comment: Fixed author nam

State or nature? Endogenous formal versus informal sanctions in the voluntary provision of public goods

We investigate the endogenous formation of sanctioning institutions supposed to improve efficiency in the voluntary provision of public goods. Our paper parallels Markussen et al. (Rev Econ Stud 81:301–324, 2014) in that our experimental subjects vote over formal versus informal sanctions, but it goes beyond that paper by endogenizing the formal sanction scheme. We find that self-determined formal sanctions schemes are popular and efficient when they carry no up-front cost, but as in Markussen et al. informal sanctions are more popular and efficient than formal sanctions when adopting the latter entails such a cost. Practice improves the performance of sanction schemes: they become more targeted and deterrent with learning. Voters’ characteristics, including their tendency to engage in perverse informal sanctioning, help to predict individual voting

Almost-Tight Bounds on Preserving Cuts in Classes of Submodular Hypergraphs

Recently, a number of variants of the notion of cut-preserving hypergraph sparsification have been studied in the literature. These variants include directed hypergraph sparsification, submodular hypergraph sparsification, general notions of approximation including spectral approximations, and more general notions like sketching that can answer cut queries using more general data structures than just sparsifiers. In this work, we provide reductions between these different variants of hypergraph sparsification and establish new upper and lower bounds on the space complexity of preserving their cuts. At a high level, our results use the same general principle, namely, by showing that cuts in one class of hypergraphs can be simulated by cuts in a simpler class of hypergraphs, we can leverage sparsification results for the simpler class of hypergraphs

Damping of sound waves in superfluid nucleon-hyperon matter of neutron stars

We consider sound waves in superfluid nucleon-hyperon matter of massive neutron-star cores. We calculate and analyze the speeds of sound modes and their damping times due to the shear viscosity and non-equilibrium weak processes of particle transformations. For that, we employ the dissipative relativistic hydrodynamics of a superfluid nucleon-hyperon mixture, formulated recently [M.E. Gusakov and E.M. Kantor, Phys. Rev. D78, 083006 (2008)]. We demonstrate that the damping times of sound modes calculated using this hydrodynamics and the ordinary (nonsuperfluid) one, can differ from each other by several orders of magnitude.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, Phys. Rev. D accepte