A Trade Network Game With Endogenous Partner Selection

. This paper develops an evolutionary trade network game (TNG) that combines evolutionary game play with endogenous partner selection. Successive generations of resource-constrained buyers and sellers choose and refuse trade partners on the basis of continually updated expected payoffs. Trade partner selection takes place in accordance with a modified Gale-Shapley matching mechanism, and trades are implemented using trade strategies evolved via a standardly specified genetic algorithm. The trade partnerships resulting from the matching mechanism are shown to be core stable and Pareto optimal in each successive trade cycle. Nevertheless, computer experiments suggest that these static optimality properties may be inadequate measures of optimality from an evolutionary perspective. 1 Introduction Evolutionary game studies typically focus on the optimality properties of strategy configurations when agents are matched randomly or deterministically by some extraneous device. The optimality p..

Examining the role of ideological and political education on university students’ civic perceptions and civic participation in Mainland China: Some hints from contemporary citizenship theory

A long existing compulsive curriculum of ideological and political education is employed by the Chinese government to promote citizenship education among Chinese university students. This article builds on the findings of a mixed-methods research that examined the role of ideological and political education on university students’ civic perceptions and civic participation. The results showed little evidence of this curriculum having a clear effect on students’ political participation such as voting, as well as their idealized broad civic participation, but did reveal relatively positive effects on students’ civic intention and civic expression. In addition, it also identified its significant role in organizing students towards attending party-related activities. It shows that ideological and political education is insufficient to achieve specified aims of citizenship education among Chinese university students. We then argue that it results from a mechanistic understanding of citizenship and participation in educational policies and structural barriers to young people’s formal participation. Hence, this article argues that the forms and contents of citizenship education in China need to be reconsidered beyond the limits of the current ideological and political education and that the analyses contributed to an argument for a broader approach to citizenship education to be developed and adopted