Paradoxes in Social Networks with Multiple Products

Recently, we introduced in arXiv:1105.2434 a model for product adoption in social networks with multiple products, where the agents, influenced by their neighbours, can adopt one out of several alternatives. We identify and analyze here four types of paradoxes that can arise in these networks. To this end, we use social network games that we recently introduced in arxiv:1202.2209. These paradoxes shed light on possible inefficiencies arising when one modifies the sets of products available to the agents forming a social network. One of the paradoxes corresponds to the well-known Braess paradox in congestion games and shows that by adding more choices to a node, the network may end up in a situation that is worse for everybody. We exhibit a dual version of this, where removing available choices from someone can eventually make everybody better off. The other paradoxes that we identify show that by adding or removing a product from the choice set of some node may lead to permanent instability. Finally, we also identify conditions under which some of these paradoxes cannot arise.Comment: 22 page

Time travel paradoxes, path integrals, and the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics

We consider two approaches to evading paradoxes in quantum mechanics with closed timelike curves (CTCs). In a model similar to Politzer's, assuming pure states and using path integrals, we show that the problems of paradoxes and of unitarity violation are related; preserving unitarity avoids paradoxes by modifying the time evolution so that improbable events bewcome certain. Deutsch has argued, using the density matrix, that paradoxes do not occur in the "many worlds interpretation". We find that in this approach account must be taken of the resolution time of the device that detects objects emerging from a wormhole or other time machine. When this is done one finds that this approach is viable only if macroscopic objects traversing a wormhole interact with it so strongly that they are broken into microscopic fragments.Comment: no figure

Superluminal Signals: Causal Loop Paradoxes Revisited

Recent results demonstrating superluminal group velocities and tachyonic dispersion relations reopen the question of superluminal signals and causal loop paradoxes. The sense in which superluminal signals are permitted is explained in terms of pulse reshaping, and the self-consistent behavior which prevents causal loop paradoxes is illustrated by an explicit example.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

Chain Paradoxes

For nearly two centuries the dynamics of chains have offered examples of paradoxical theoretical predictions. Here we propose a theory for the dissipative dynamics of one-dimensional continua with singularities which provides a unified treatment for chain problems that have suffered from paradoxical solutions. These problems are duly solved within the present theory and their paradoxes removed---we hope

The Paradoxes of the Interaction-Free Measurement

Interaction-free measurements introduced by Elitzur and Vaidman [Found. Phys. 23, 987 (1993)] allow finding infinitely fragile objects without destroying them. Paradoxical features of these and related measurements are discussed. The resolution of the paradoxes in the framework of the Many-Worlds Interpretation is proposed.Comment: 8 pages, 7 eps figures. Contribution to the "Mysteries and Paradoxes in Quantum Mechanics", Garda Lake 200

Paradoxes Review

I came across one of the Smarandache divine paradoxes and felt very strongly that it is really our Buddhist·s obIigation to lhelp understand the uuderlying truth. There seem a lot of toughest points in the cultural difference and it will be the most difticuIt job to reach the mutual point as neutrality. What I can do is to try our best and find cooperation. Limited to the time, I just put a few as my first review