411 research outputs found
Why the Realist-Instrumentalist Debate about Rational Choice Rests on a Mistake
Within the social sciences, much controversy exists about which status should be ascribed to the rationality assumption that forms the core of rational choice theories. Whilst realists argue that the rationality assumption is an empirical claim which describes real processes that cause individual action, instrumentalists maintain that it amounts to nothing more than an analytically set axiom or ‘as if’ hypothesis which helps in the generation of accurate predictions. In this paper, I argue that this realist-instrumentalist debate about rational choice theory can be overcome once it is realised that the rationality assumption is neither an empirical description nor an ‘as if’ hypothesis, but a normative claim
Sequential Deliberation for Social Choice
In large scale collective decision making, social choice is a normative study
of how one ought to design a protocol for reaching consensus. However, in
instances where the underlying decision space is too large or complex for
ordinal voting, standard voting methods of social choice may be impractical.
How then can we design a mechanism - preferably decentralized, simple,
scalable, and not requiring any special knowledge of the decision space - to
reach consensus? We propose sequential deliberation as a natural solution to
this problem. In this iterative method, successive pairs of agents bargain over
the decision space using the previous decision as a disagreement alternative.
We describe the general method and analyze the quality of its outcome when the
space of preferences define a median graph. We show that sequential
deliberation finds a 1.208- approximation to the optimal social cost on such
graphs, coming very close to this value with only a small constant number of
agents sampled from the population. We also show lower bounds on simpler
classes of mechanisms to justify our design choices. We further show that
sequential deliberation is ex-post Pareto efficient and has truthful reporting
as an equilibrium of the induced extensive form game. We finally show that for
general metric spaces, the second moment of of the distribution of social cost
of the outcomes produced by sequential deliberation is also bounded
The promotion of local wellbeing: A primer for policymakers
There is growing interest among policymakers in the promotion of wellbeing as an
objective of public policy. In particular, local authorities have been given powers to
undertake action to promote wellbeing in their area. Recent advances in the academic
literature on wellbeing are giving rise to an increasingly detailed picture of the factors
that determine people’s subjective wellbeing (how they think and feel about their lives).
However, the concept of subjective wellbeing is poorly understood within local
government and much of the evidence base is extremely recent. I therefore review the
literature on the definition, measurement, and determinants of wellbeing, and discuss
some of its implications for local public policy
Designing cost-sharing methods for Bayesian games
We study the design of cost-sharing protocols for two fundamental resource allocation problems, the Set Cover and the Steiner Tree Problem, under environments of incomplete information (Bayesian model). Our objective is to design protocols where the worst-case Bayesian Nash equilibria, have low cost, i.e. the Bayesian Price of Anarchy (PoA) is minimized. Although budget balance is a very natural requirement, it puts considerable restrictions on the design space, resulting in high PoA. We propose an alternative, relaxed requirement called budget balance in the equilibrium (BBiE).We show an interesting connection between algorithms for Oblivious Stochastic optimization problems and cost-sharing design with low PoA. We exploit this connection for both problems and we enforce approximate solutions of the stochastic problem, as Bayesian Nash equilibria, with the same guarantees on the PoA. More interestingly, we show how to obtain the same bounds on the PoA, by using anonymous posted prices which are desirable because they are easy to implement and, as we show, induce dominant strategies for the players
Occasional errors can benefit coordination
The chances solving a problem that involves coordination between people are increased by introducing robotic players that sometimes make mistakes. This finding has implications for real-world coordination problems
Finding the set of k-additive dominating measures viewed as a flow problem
n this paper we deal with the problem of obtaining the set of k-additive measures dominating a fuzzy measure. This problem extends the problem of deriving the set of probabilities dominating a fuzzy measure, an important problem appearing in Decision Making and Game Theory. The solution proposed in the paper follows the line developed by Chateauneuf and Jaffray for dominating probabilities and continued by Miranda et al. for dominating k-additive belief functions. Here, we address the general case transforming the problem into a similar one such that the involved set functions have non-negative Möbius transform; this simplifies the problem and allows a result similar to the one developed for belief functions. Although the set obtained is very large, we show that the conditions cannot be sharpened. On the other hand, we also show that it is possible to define a more restrictive subset, providing a more natural extension of the result for probabilities, such that it is possible to derive any k-additive dominating measure from it
The Value of Information in Selfish Routing
Path selection by selfish agents has traditionally been studied by comparing
social optima and equilibria in the Wardrop model, i.e., by investigating the
Price of Anarchy in selfish routing. In this work, we refine and extend the
traditional selfish-routing model in order to answer questions that arise in
emerging path-aware Internet architectures. The model enables us to
characterize the impact of different degrees of congestion information that
users possess. Furthermore, it allows us to analytically quantify the impact of
selfish routing, not only on users, but also on network operators. Based on our
model, we show that the cost of selfish routing depends on the network
topology, the perspective (users versus network operators), and the information
that users have. Surprisingly, we show analytically and empirically that less
information tends to lower the Price of Anarchy, almost to the optimum. Our
results hence suggest that selfish routing has modest social cost even without
the dissemination of path-load information.Comment: 27th International Colloquium on Structural Information and
Communication Complexity (SIROCCO 2020
The Emergence of Consensus: a primer
The origin of population-scale coordination has puzzled philosophers and scientists for centuries. Recently, game theory, evolutionary approaches and complex systems science have provided quantitative insights on the mechanisms of social consensus. This paper overviews the main dimensions over which the debate has unfolded and discusses some representative results, with a focus on those situations in which consensus emerges `spontaneously' in absence of centralised institutions. Covered topics include the macroscopic consequences of the different microscopic rules of behavioural contagion, the role of social networks, and the mechanisms that prevent the formation of a consensus or alter it after it has emerged. Special attention is devoted to the recent wave of experiments on the emergence of consensus in social systems
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