Student evaluation of teaching, social influence dynamics, and teachers' choices: An evolutionary model

AbstractThe issue of Student Evaluation of Teaching has been explored by a large literature across many decades. However, the role of social influence factors in determining teachers' responses to a given incentive and evaluation framework has been left basically unexplored. This paper makes a first attempt in this vein by considering an evolutionary game-theoretic context where teachers face a two-stage process in which their rating depends on both students' evaluation of their course and on retrospective students' evaluation of their teaching output in view of students' performance in a related follow-up course. We find that both high effort (difficult course offered) and low effort (easy course offered) outcomes may emerge, leading either to a socially optimal outcome for teachers or not, according to cases. Moreover, there may be a potential conflict between the optimal outcome for students and for teachers. We also consider possible ways to generalize our model in future research

Princes Charming are not all made equal. The social cognition of mating strategies in four classical fairy tales

In this paper, we apply the so-called Tie-Up Theory to the analysis of the social cognition of mating processes in fairy tales. Our analysis considers the four classical fairy tales that are more relevant to this topic, and proves how their structure systematically reflects the logic of the male–female interaction anticipated by the theory, and in addition allows to formulate an interesting typology of strategic approaches by the male partner. Unlike preexisting interpretations, where fairy tale characters tend to be presented as stereotypes, our analysis shows how, in their most sophisticated and interesting variants, the said fairy tales place an emphasis on the unique individual traits that make the potential partners reciprocally fit to form the couple. This change of perspective is conducive to interesting applications both from the viewpoint of the analysis of fairy tales and in terms of the implications of the related form of social cognition for the study and the understanding of human behavior

Complex Urban Systems: Challenges and Integrated Solutions for the Sustainability and Resilience of Cities

For decades, from design theory to urban planning and management, from social sciences to urban environmental science, cities have been probed and analyzed from the partial perspective of single disciplines. The digital era, with its unprecedented data availability, is allowing for testing old theories and developing new ones, ultimately challenging relatively partial models. Our community has been in the last years providing more and more compelling evidence that cities are complex systems with emergent phenomena characterized by the collective behavior of their citizens who are themselves complex systems. However, more recently, it has also been shown that such multiscale complexity alone is not enough to describe some salient features of urban systems. Multilayer network modeling, accounting for both multiplexity of relationships and interdependencies among the city's subsystems, is indeed providing a novel integrated framework to study urban backbones, their resilience to unexpected perturbations due to internal or external factors, and their human flows. In this paper, we first offer an overview of the transdisciplinary efforts made to cope with the three dimensions of complexity of the city: the complexity of the urban environment, the complexity of human cognition about the city, and the complexity of city planning. In particular, we discuss how the most recent findings, for example, relating the health and wellbeing of communities to urban structure and function, from traffic congestion to distinct types of pollution, can be better understood considering a city as a multiscale and multilayer complex system. The new challenges posed by the postpandemic scenario give to this perspective an unprecedented relevance, with the necessity to address issues of reconstruction of the social fabric, recovery from prolonged psychological, social and economic stress with the ensuing mental health and wellbeing issues, and repurposing of urban organization as a consequence of new emerging practices such as massive remote working. By rethinking cities as large-scale active matter systems far from equilibrium which consume energy, process information, and adapt to the environment, we argue that enhancing social engagement, for example, involving citizens in codesigning the city and its changes in this critical postpandemic phase, can trigger widespread adoption of good practices leading to emergent effects with collective benefits which can be directly measured

Endogenous Preferences and Private Provision of Public Goods: a Double Critical Mass Model

In this paper we set up an evolutionary game-theoretic model aimed at addressing the issue of local public good provision via direct commitment of voluntary forces (namely, private donors and nonprofit providers) only. Two classes of agents are assumed to strategically interact within a double critical mass model, where the provision and maintenance, on voluntary bases, of a public-type good is concerned. Uncertainty as to equilibrium outcomes emerges as within both categories a positive proportion of agents faces the temptation to opportunistically free ride on others efforts. Further, private donors and nonprofit providers payoff functions are interdependent, in the sense that (a) potential donors decide to be actual donors only insofar as a large enough proportion of nonprofit organizations provides a high effort level, otherwise they act as free riders; (b) nonprofit organizations, in turn, prefer to exert a high productive effort only insofar as a large enough proportion of potential donors acts as actual donors, otherwise they exert a low effort level. Through this analytical framework, we are able to focus on the critical factors affecting the dynamic outcome of such interaction: under certain conditions, in a medium-long run perspective, even in contexts where, initially, either a large proportion of agents behaves as free riders or a large proportion of nonprofit organizations exerts a low effort level, the local public good may be provided.Public Goods; Evolutionary Crowding-out; Voluntary Sector;

Public Security vs. Private Self-Protection: Optimal Taxation and the Social Dynamics of Fear

In this paper, we develop a simple model of social dynamics governing the evolution of strategic self-protection choices of boundedly rational potential victims facing the threat of prospective offenders in a large population with random matching. We prove that individual (and socially transmitted) fear of exposure to criminal threats may actually condition choices even in the face of objective evidence of declining crime rates, and thereby cause the eventual selection of Pareto inefficient equilibria with self-protection. We also show that a suitable strategy of provision of public security financed through discriminatory taxation of self-protective expenses may actually overcome this problem, and drive the social dynamics toward the efficient no protection equilibrium. In our model, we do not obtain, as in Cressman et al. (1998), a crowding-out result such that the net impact of public spending on the actual social dynamics is neutral and the economy keeps on cycling between phases of high and low criminal activity with varying levels of self-protection; quite to the contrary, it can be extremely effective in implementing the social optimum, in that it acts primarily on the intangible dimension, that is, on the social dynamics of fear. We claim that this kind of result calls for more interdisciplinary research on the socio-psycho-economic determinants of fear of crime, and for consequent advances in modelling approaches and techniques.Self-Protection, Fear of Crime, Cultural Selection Dynamics, Replicator Dynamics

Participation, growth and social poverty: social capital in a homogeneous society

We introduce social capital accumulation into a neoclassical model, showing how it differs from physical and human capital accumulation. We take the view that social capital is crucial to the enjoyment of socially provided goods and that it is mainly accumulated by means of participation to social activities. Under-investment in social capital maylead a growing economy to fall into a social poverty trap. We argue that this risk is particularly relevant for advanced societies.Social capital; self-protection choices; social poverty traps

Economic Growth and Social Poverty: The Evolution of Social Participation

We develop an evolutionary model of growth in which agents choose how to allocate their time between private and social activities. We argue that a shift from social to private activities may foster market-based growth, but also generate social poverty. Within a formal framework that merges a game theoretic analysis of the evolution of social participation with a model of dynamic accumulation of its effects on social environment (i.e., of social capital accumulation), we show that growth and well-being may evolve in opposite directions (a plausible outcome for advanced and affluent societies).Time Allocation, Social Capital, Relational Goods

Social capital accumulation and the evolution of social partecipation

We study the co-evolution of social participation and social capital accumulation, taking the view that the former contributes to the latter, and both contribute to the enjoyment of relational goods Within this framework, we show that a process of substitution of private for social activities (observable in some advanced, affluent economies), might be self-reinforcing and lead to a Pareto-dominated steady state. We find some scope for policy intervention, but we also acknowledge its difficulty.Social Capita; Well-being; Time Allocation

Expectations, Animal Spirits, and Evolutionary Dynamics

We consider a (deterministic) evolutionary model where players have dynamic expectations about the strategy distribution. We provide a global analysis of the co-evolution of play and expectations for a generic two{by{two game. Besides the the typical indeterminacy of the evolutionary dynamics, we find some other ones: for any initial strategy configuration the dynamics can converge to any asymptotically stable fixed point, for different initial values of the expectations. Moreover, starting from the same initial pair of strategy configuration and values of expectations, the dynamics may lead to different asymptotically stable fixed points for different parameters of the expectations.evolutionary games, dynamic systems, animal spirits