Game-theoretic Considerations Research Articles

The Sharp Interface Limit of an Ising Game

The Ising model of statistical physics has served as a keystone example of phase transitions, thermodynamic limits, scaling laws, and many other phenomena and mathematical methods. We introduce and explore an Ising game, a variant of the Ising model that features competing agents influencing the behavior of the spins. With long-range interactions, we consider a mean-field limit resulting in a nonlocal potential game at the mesoscopic scale. This game exhibits a phase transition and multiple constant Nash-equilibria in the supercritical regime. Our analysis focuses on a sharp interface limit for which potential minimizing solutions to the Ising game concentrate on two of the constant Nash-equilibria. We show that the mesoscopic problem can be recast as a mixed local/nonlocal space-time Allen-Cahn type minimization problem. We prove, using a Γ-convergence argument, that the limiting interface minimizes a space-time anisotropic perimeter type energy functional. This macroscopic scale problem could also be viewed as a problem of optimal control of interface motion. Sharp interface limits of Allen-Cahn type functionals have been well studied. We build on that literature with new techniques to handle a mixture of local derivative terms and nonlocal interactions. The boundary conditions imposed by the game theoretic considerations also appear as novel terms and require special treatment.

Theories, methodologies, and effects of affect-adaptive games: A systematic review

Affect-adaptive games gained in popularity over the last years in human computer interactions studies, promising potential benefits for player experience, performance, and even health. It is however not yet clear how affective games are being evaluated, what the precise effects are, and how they are based on emotion theoretical concepts that are still not universally agreed upon. This systematic review investigated these questions by analysing relevant high-quality evaluation studies of the effect of affect-adaptive video games on various outcomes in regards to their effects, theoretical assumptions, and methodologies. Out of 3,930 papers, 26 studies were included based on preregistered inclusion and exclusion criteria. A high variance regarding theoretical assumptions and methodological approaches was observed, as well as an overall poor methodological rigour, leading to the conclusion that more work is needed in constructing better methodological standards for game evaluation studies and theoretical considerations when developing and testing affect-adaptive video games.

Collective intelligence as a public good

We discuss measures of collective intelligence in evolved and designed self-organizing ensembles, defining collective intelligence in terms of the benefits to be gained through the exchange of information and other resources, as well as through coordination or cooperation, in the interests of a public good. These benefits can be numerous, from estimating a hard-to-observe cue to efficiently searching for resource. The measures should also account for costs to individuals, such as in attention or energy, and trade-offs for the ensemble, such as the flexibility to respond to an important change in the environment versus stability that is robust to unimportant variability. When there is a tension between the interests of the individual and those of the group, game-theoretic considerations may affect the level of collective intelligence that can be achieved. Models of individual rules that yield collective dynamics with multi-stable solutions provide a means to examine and shape collective intelligence in evolved and designed systems.

Socio-Sexual Education Is Best Addressed as a Field of Study

Sex education typically claims to be value free. The focus of attention in this article is that sex education represents an extraordinary “teachable moment” for helping students consider the qualia of human engagements at a multiplicity of levels. Qualia is a term for the feel and hence the value of experience. Learning about the process of copulating machinery reveals little about the “feel” of sexual experience.
 
 Sex education should address issues students will continue to confront for the rest of their lives. Typically, students seem to waffle their way through sexually relevant encounters. Allure and fear are relevant emotions students should be mindful of when considering socio-sexual engagements of any kind. Consequently, rather than focus exclusively on sexual behavior and its consequences, educators should focus on what I have previously introduced as socio-sexual education. Socio-sexual education involves game-theoretic considerations but goes further than mere cost/benefit analysis. Socio-sexual education should focus student attention on understanding of sex and social engagements generally. People live in and through their experiences and not as mere spectators of some narrative in which experience is written about. Learning to understand socio-sexual experiences allows subsequent social and sexual adjustments for improving lived experience over a lifetime. Sex education then should broaden to socio-sexual instruction and reflection.

The behavioural challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic: indirect measurements and personalized attitude changing treatments (IMPACT).

Following the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, governments around the globe coerced their citizens to adhere to preventive health behaviours, aiming to reduce the effective reproduction numbers of the virus. Driven by game theoretic considerations and inspired by the work of US National Research Council's Committee on Food Habits (1943) during WWII, and the post-WWII Yale Communication Research Program, the present research shows how to achieve enhanced adherence to health regulations without coercion. To this aim, we combine three elements: (i) indirect measurements, (ii) personalized interventions, and (iii) attitude changing treatments (IMPACT). We find that a cluster of short interventions, such as elaboration on possible consequences, induction of cognitive dissonance, addressing next of kin and similar others and receiving advice following severity judgements, improves individuals' health-preserving attitudes. We propose extending the use of IMPACT under closure periods and during the resumption of social and economic activities under COVID-19 pandemic, since efficient and lasting adherence should rely on personal attitudes rather than on coercion alone. Finally, we point to the opportunity of international cooperation generated by the pandemic.

Can \u2018Civil Enterprises\u2019 survive in the market? Some game theoretical considerations on the one-shot game

Civil enterprises (CEs) are firms whose main goal is to produce benefits for the community, working according to a logic of reciprocity. In this paper we discuss, from a game theoretical perspective, as to what extent it is possible for such enterprises to survive in competition with profit-maximizing firms in the marketplace, since market competition might take the form of a prisoner’s dilemma game, where the public good at stake is the commitment to moral rules. In those games cooperative strategies are strictly dominated by the defective behavior of the players, i.e. CEs would not survive while retaining their values. We argue that market competition is more appropriately modelled as an n-firm model and show that, given a sufficient number of CEs in the market, they can survive despite having to interact with for-profit firms, even when the game is played only once.

Pravo i teorija igara - primer prava Svetske trgovinske organizacije

The ultimate goal of game theory is to provide a theoretical model for strategic situations' analysis, i.e. for situations where one actor's choice depends on the behavior of other players in the game. As a concept, game theory is also applicable to the legal context. Legal dialectics and processes are often conducted in some form of strategic interactions. Game theory is a way to see how legal rules affect particular actors' behavior. International Economic Law has its own dynamics which makes the process similar to the analysis through the game theoretical tools. Therefore, the rules of international law are considered as the rules of the game that are taking place among different actors. Game theoretical considerations clarify the substance of the interaction and cooperation of players involved (states, international organizations and other actors). Game theory provides a basis for normative analysis of the issue of implementation of the rules of international law and improves understanding of those rules. The topic of the paper is the application of the game theory in the context of the legal framework established by the World Trade Organization. The member states' dilemma between using the advantages and liberalization options provided by the WTO on the one hand, and joining the regional trade agreements, on the other one, is strategic by nature. Therefore, game theory can contribute to understanding and resolving, using the game of 'prisoner's dilemma' as a model. It is the game which clearly shows that a group of rational egoists can end up worse than a group of actors that acts prima facie contrary to their own interests. 'Prisoner's dilemma' demonstrates why society and law has the need for coordination as well as mechanisms for co-operation. WTO member states put emphasis on the process of liberalization conducted in the framework of regional trade agreements (RTAs); at the same time, their participation in WTO negotiations is not effective and efficient enough to make a breakthrough in the multilateral framework. A solution of the game for Member States is not to cooperate: i. e, liberalization is primarily achieved through regional agreements rather than within the WTO. The rational decision of the Member States (opting for a regional approach) has resulted in a suboptimal result, which is a basic characteristic of the game model based on a prisoner's dilemma: in this case, the optimal solution would be cooperation through a multilateral framework (World Trade Organization).

Game Theoretic Considerations for Optimizing Efficiency of Taxi Systems

Taxi service is an indispensable part of public transport in modern cities due to its unique end-to-end convenience, flexible timetable, and comfortable riding experience. To support these advantages, taxi systems adopt a decentralized operation mode where taxi drivers strategically decide their schedules and routes and compete with each other for individual profits regardless of the system level efficiency. Not surprisingly, taxi systems are therefore usually inefficient and difficult to optimize. While taxi drivers’ strategic behavior plays a central role here, they were unfortunately ignored in most existing research. To overcome the inadequacy, we proposed a game-theoretic approach to model taxi drivers’ behavior. We apply the model to optimizing the pricing scheme of taxi markets, and in particular to solving a long-standing issue known as the peak-time dilemma in Beijing's taxi market.

Game-Theoretic Considerations for Optimizing Taxi System Efficiency

Taxi service is an indispensable part of public transport in modern cities. To support its unique features, a taxi system adopts a decentralized operation mode in which thousands of taxis freely decide their working schedules and routes. Taxis compete with each other for individual profits regardless of system-level efficiency, making the taxi system inefficient and hard to optimize. Most research into the management and economics of taxi markets has focused on modeling from a macro level the effects of and relationships between various market factors. Less has been done regarding a more important component--drivers' strategic behavior under the decentralized operation mode. The authors propose looking at the problem from a game-theoretic perspective. Combining game-theoretic solution concepts with existing models of taxi markets, they model taxi drivers' strategy-making process as a game and transform the problem of optimizing taxi system efficiency into finding a market policy that leads to the desired equilibrium.

Why Pursue Unification? A Social-Epistemological Puzzle

Many have argued that unified theories ought to be pursued wherever possible. We deny this on the basis of social-epistemological and game-theoretic considerations. Consequently, those seeking a more ubiquitous role for unification must either attend to the scientific community’s social structure in greater detail than has been the case, and/or radically revise their conception of unification.

The evolution of the game of baccarat

The game of baccarat has evolved from a parlor game played by French aristocrats in the first half of the 19th century to a casino game that generated over US$41 billion in revenue for the casinos of Macau in 2013. The parlor game was originally a three-person zero-sum game. Later in the 19th century it was simplified to a two-person zero-sum game. Early in the 20th century the parlor game became a casino game, no longer zero-sum. In the mid 20th century, the strategic casino game became a nonstrategic game, with players competing against the house instead of against each other. We argue that this evolution was motivated by both economic and game-theoretic considerations.

Variegated competing peer-to-peer systems with selfish peers

Thanks to years of research and development, current peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are anything but a homogeneous system from a protocol perspective. Specifically, even for the same P2P system (e.g., BitTorrent), a large number of protocol variants have been designed based on game theoretic considerations with the objective to gain performance advantages. We envision that such variants could be deployed by selfish participants and interact with the original prescribed protocol as well as among them. Consequently, a meta-strategic situation—judicious selection of different protocol variants—will emerge. In this work, we propose the usage of population games, evolutionary and learning dynamics in the study of node coevolution for selfish protocol selection, and, most importantly, its impact on system performance. We apply our models and algorithms to P2P systems and draw on extensive simulations to characterize the dynamics of selfish protocol selection. In particular, our proposed distributed algorithms outperform others in terms of download rate. We believe that evolution patterns identified in our study will shed light on both further theoretical study and the design of next generation distributed systems.

Normality and Majority: Towards a Statistical Understanding of Normality Statements

Normality judgements are frequently used in everyday communication as well as in biological and social science. Moreover they became increasingly relevant to formal logic as part of defeasible reasoning. This paper distinguishes different kinds of normality statements. It is argued that normality laws like “Birds can normally fly” should be understood essentially in a statistical way. The argument has basically two parts: firstly, a statistical semantic core is mandatory for a descriptive reading of normality in order to explain the logical features of normality laws. Secondly, a statistical justification of normality statements can be derived by game theoretic considerations if the normality law is understood as communication convention.

Public goods in relation to competition, cooperation, and spite.

Public goods and common-pool resources are fundamental features of biological and social systems, and pose core challenges in achieving sustainability; for such situations, the immediate interests of individuals and the societies in which they are embedded are in potential conflict, involving game-theoretic considerations whose resolution need not serve the collective good. Evolution has often confronted such dilemmas--e.g., in bacterial biofilms--in the challenges of cancer, in nitrogen fixation and chelation, in the production of antibiotics, and in collective action problems across animal groups; there is much to learn from the Darwinian resolution of these situations for how to address problems our societies face today. Addressing these problems involves understanding the emergence of cooperative agreements, from reciprocal altruism and insurance arrangements to the social norms and more formal institutions that maintain societies. At the core are the issues of how individuals and societies discount the future and the interests of others, and the degree that individual decisions are influenced by regard for others. Ultimately, as Garrett Hardin suggested, the solution to problems of the commons is in "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon," and hence in how groups of individuals form and how they arrive at decisions that ultimately benefit all.

The Artificial Intelligence Development Axioms (A.I.D.A.)

Within this paper is a set of critical new developmental principles concerning the inevitable historical evolution of the faculties of artificial intelligence, as well as the humans manipulating their capabilities.  The results may be referred to as axioms as they are contingent on irreducible mathematical models which map the capacities of said artificial intelligence, and the game theoretic considerations of the optimal decision-making of their sentient counterparts.  The paper is divided into four primary sections, covering the four primary principles of A.I.D.A., with additional preliminary and concluding sections.  It is to be stressed that these are inevitable principles of artificial intelligence development, not merely hypothetical considerations, and this fact emphasizes the importance of their acknowledgment and dissemination within the scope of current academia and scholastic discourse.  This paper, and the development of artificial intelligence research, is indebted to the work of many great minds in the century past; however the most prominent figure in whose name this work is dedicated, is the great Hungarian-American mathematician and technologist, John Von Neumann, who first coined the term “technological singularity”, of which this work is the precise elaboration.

An evolutionary game of leaf dynamics and its consequences for canopy structure

Summary Canopy photosynthesis models combined with optimization theory have been an important tool to understand environmental responses and interspecific variations in vegetation structure and functioning, but their predictions are often quantitatively incorrect. Although evolutionary game theory and the dynamic modelling of leaf turnover have been suggested useful to solve this problem, there is no model that combines these features. Here, we present such a model of leaf area dynamics that incorporates game theory. Leaf area index (LAI; leaf area per unit ground area) was predicted to increase with an increasing degree of interaction between genetically distinct neighbour plants in light interception. This implies that stands of clonal plants that consist of genetically identical daughter ramets have different LAI from other plants. LAI was also sensitive to the assumed vertical pattern of leaf shedding: LAI was predicted to increase with the degree to which leaves were assumed to be shed from higher positions in the canopy. Our model provides more realistic predictions of LAI than previous static optimization, dynamic optimization or static game theoretical models. We suggest that both leaf dynamics and game theoretical considerations of plant competition are indispensable to scale from individual leaf traits to the structure and functioning of vegetation stands, especially in herbaceous species.

Irrigania – a web-based game about sharing water resources

Abstract. For teaching about collaboration and conflicts with regard to shared water resources, various types of games offer valuable opportunities. Single-player computer games often give much power to the player and ignore the fact that the best for some group might be difficult to achieve in reality if the individuals have their own interests. Here we present a new game called Irrigania, which aims at representing water conflicts among several actors in a simplified way. While simple in its rules, this game illustrates several game-theoretical situations typical for water-related conflicts. The game has been implemented as a web-based computer game, which allows easy application in classes. First classroom applications of the game indicated that, despite the simple rules, interesting patterns can evolve when playing the game in a class. These patterns can be used to discuss game theoretical considerations related to water resource sharing.

The Dependence of the Concept of Law Upon Cognitive Interest

This essay represents an invitation to read once more those writers (Geiger, Popitz, Weber) who have come in for particularly critical attention from adherents of legal pluralism. Insofar I deal first of all here with the relevant works of Heinrich Popitz, before then turning to Max Weber. A rather more thorough examination of Max Weber seems advisable here, since legal pluralists link his name with the idea that law is linked to the ‘sovereign state’, while one can also read that as far as theoretical conceptualisation is concerned, “Max Weber is one of the first social scientists in whose thinking something like legal pluralism was possible,” although with the rider added: “whatever one might think of his concept of law” (F von Benda-Beckmann 1994). An accurate look at the conceptual architectonic of Weber's Basic Sociological Terms shows that Weber did not connect means of coercion and coercive apparatus to the state, but to quite specific structures of societisation (Vergesellschaftung). Strictly speaking it is a matter of “anstaltsmaessige Vergesellschaftung”. The section dealing with Weber closes by introducing some game-theoretic considerations, with the aid of which Sally F. Moore’s conception of the 'semi-autonomous social field’ is extended, using this to examine something that Weber himself could not have contemplated, that the law is not strictly (‘as if by command’) adhered to, but negotiated, as it was even during his lifetime. In conclusion the work of Theodor Geiger and Christian Sigrist are briefly introduced, in particular the manner in which Sigrist, in criticising Geiger’s concept of law, falls into the trap of “nostrification” (Nostrifizierung), i.e. “reading someone else in one’s own terms” (Matthes 1992). Nonetheless, the prime aim is discussion of the concept of law that Franz von Benda-Beckmann developed for comparative usage, since among other things this is associated with the claim that it presents legal pluralism with an instrumentarium suited to the avoidance of the ‘trap of nostrification.’

Game theoretic considerations for Kenyan health governance

Transparency is essential if any public provisioning function is to gain widespread legitimacy. Even though most governmental processes are complex and long-term, the public must have some trust and confidence that the processes are legitimate. In theory, the ‘ideal type’ good governance requires innovative personnel able to realize substantial public benefits, including improved service quality, risk sharing with the private sector, and cost savings. The paper argues that heath care administrators and service providers need to incorporate game theoretic considerations in their practice in order to achieve market-driven competition, equitable risk sharing, effective performance guarantees, and appropriate transparency.Key words: Game theory, social capital, good governance, health policy, health systems.

A survey of quantum games

This paper presents an overview and survey of a new type of game-theoretic setting based on ideas emanating from quantum computing. (We provide a brief overview of quantum computing at the beginning of the paper.) Initial results suggest this view brings more flexibility and possibilities into decisions involving game-theoretic considerations. Applications cover a broad spectrum of classical games as well as games in economics, finance and other areas.