High Payoff Research Articles

When does metacognition evolve in the opt-out paradigm?

Metacognition (awareness of one’s own knowledge) is taken for granted in humans, but its evolution in non-human animals is not well understood. While there is experimental evidence of seemingly metacognitive judgements across species, studies rarely focus on why metacognition may have evolved. To address this, I present an evolutionary model of the opt-out paradigm, a common experiment used to assess animal’s metacognition. Individuals are repeatedly presented with a task or problem and must decide between opting-out and receiving a fixed payoff or opting-in and receiving a larger reward if they successfully solve the task. Two evolving traits – bias and metacognition – jointly determine whether individuals opt-in. The task’s reward, the mean probability of success and the variability in success across trials, and the cost of metacognition were varied. Results identify two scenarios where metacognition evolves: (1) environments where success variability is high; and (2) environments where mean success is low, but rewards are high. Overall, the results support predictions implicating uncertainty in the evolution of metacognition but suggest metacognition may also evolve in conditions where metacognition can be used to identify cases where an otherwise inaccessible high payoff is easy to acquire.

Emergence of an unpredictable evolution in a spatial prisoner’s dilemma via a player’s multiple perspectives

Spatial prisoner’s dilemma (SPD) has attracted researchers’ attention as a model of conflict for players. In SPD, players have two different strategies, namely, defectors and cooperators. A defector earns a high payoff from an opponent co-operator while getting nothing from an opponent defector. On the contrary, cooperators promote a win–win relationship between the two cooperators. These mechanisms influence population dynamics in SPD, and many SPD models have been developed. However, little is known about the emergence of an unstable or unpredictable evolution in population dynamics using an SPD model, which may be observed in living systems. In addressing this issue, two SPD models were proposed. In both models, players change the neighborhood definition in accordance with their strategies and sometimes select the rule for this change using probability or local information. Result showed that our models generated characteristic population patterns that may be linked to a self-organized criticality (SOC), a term referring to many systems of interconnected, nonlinear elements that evolve over time into a critical state. In fact, the second model could be spontaneously close to the critical point using local information.

Enhancing cooperative evolution in spatial public goods game by particle swarm optimization based on exploration and q-learning

In evolutionary game theory, the emergence and maintenance of cooperative behavior in a population often face challenges posed by the temptation of free-riding behavior, which offers high individual payoff. Recently, apart from a range of mechanisms that promote the formation of cooperation, individual learning abilities under limited information have emerged as a key factor in adjusting agents' strategies. This paper introduces q-learning and particle swarm optimization into the realm of evolutionary dynamics. The primary focus is on investigating the impact of Exploration-based Particle Swarm Optimization (EPSO) and Q-learning-based Particle Swarm Optimization (QPSO) on the evolution of cooperation in a continuous version of the spatial public goods game (SPGG) with punishment. EPSO defines a rule for updating agents' strategies based on individual and limited population information. It also integrates an exploration mechanism to increase the diversity and directionality of the strategies. Additionally, QPSO serves to adaptively optimize the parameters of EPSO, addressing the issue of parameter control limiting the EPSO's performance. Leveraging experiential learning and iterative adjustment, QPSO progressively refines system parameters, thus rationally assimilating knowledge and updating individual strategies to attain optimal payoff. Through extensive simulation studies, it has been observed that employing QPSO's adaptively optimized parameters in EPSO significantly promotes the cooperative evolution in the SPGG with punishment. Furthermore, individual learning coefficients, when too low or too high, both facilitate the occurrence of cooperation. Simultaneously, higher inertia weight coefficients strengthen the system's cooperation level, while lower punishment intensity coefficients and higher gain intensity coefficients effectively promote the cooperation emergence and exert a significant influence on the overall cooperation level of the system. This research provides a new perspective for designing real-world schemes that encourage cooperation and offers insights into the intricate dynamics of cooperation in complex systems.

Near-Term NASA Mars and Lunar In Situ Propellant Production: Complexity versus Simplicity

Martian in situ propellant production (ISPP) has a fundamental advantage over lunar ISPP because it has much greater leverage. The value of Martian ISPP per liftoff far exceeds that for the lunar ISPP. This study analyzes the challenges and complexity of lunar ISPP versus Mars ISPP and finds that lunar ISPP is so challenging it might not even be feasible, and if it is feasible, the payoff appears to be limited, while the investment is likely to be great. By contrast, Mars ISPP based on atmosphere only is relatively simple with high payoff. NASA is heavily focused on lunar ISPP and seemingly has diminished interest in solid oxide electrolysis of Martian CO 2 to O 2 after an extremely successful demonstration on Mars by MOXIE. This might make sense at first glance, but when the 2 leading candidates for lunar ISPP are analyzed in detail, it is found that they are extremely difficult and challenging to implement, the effort and investment involved in developing and implementing them are high, and the potential payoff is limited. By contrast, Mars ISPP by solid oxide electrolysis cell (SOEC) of CO 2 is comparatively simple and reliable and has high payoff. A SOEC system is basically landed, and a switch is turned on. The only feedstock is the ubiquitous atmosphere. Lunar ISPP involves a seemingly endless number of complex dynamic steps including autonomous traverses of excavator/haulers to unearth (unmoon?) regolith and deliver it to and from a reactor.

Science and innovation policy for New Zealand

The ‘Science of Science Policy’ is an interdisciplinary field of scholarly study that seeks to model, measure, and evaluate the interaction of public policies (including funding) and the performance of the science and innovation system. Such study offers insights and findings that can increase the effectiveness of science and innovation policy for New Zealand.
 New Zealand’s rate of public investment in research is only about two-thirds, and that of business investment in research about one-third of the OECD average. Our low business R&D intensity is not unexpected given our market size, firm size, and industrial composition. Nevertheless, public policy should aim to mitigate barriers to firms’ ability to undertake high-return research investments.
 As we undertake only 0.2% of the world’s research, most of the knowledge used in New Zealand is created elsewhere, so positioning ourselves to derive maximum benefit from others’ research is likely to have high payoff. The spillover phenomenon should be considered in making decisions about public research support. A re-balancing from competition towards cooperation, and encouraging linkages between research entities and organisations with a commercial orientation will increase the likelihood of spillover benefits.
 Research output could be increased relatively quickly by increasing the currently low expenditure per researcher, but any sustained increase will require more skilled scientists and engineers. Therefore public financing of research should include a monitored programme of training grants, and immigration policy settings that do not inhibit attracting skilled scientists and engineers. Attraction and retention of research ‘stars’ should be an explicit objective of New Zealand science policy.
 A culture of innovation requires an attitude that defines success in terms of the global market, not the local market. It requires a social, economic and cultural environment that rewards risktaking and does not see failure as a barrier to undertaking further investment. Policy makers, too, should be willing to take risks, and systematic

Do women receive less blame than men? Attribution of outcomes in a prosocial setting

We examine gender biases in the attribution of leaders’ outcomes to their choices versus luck. Leaders make unobservable investment choices that affect the payoffs of group members. High investment is costly to the leader but increases the probability of an outcome with a high payoff. We observe gender biases in the attribution of low outcomes. Low outcomes of male (female) leaders are attributed more to their selfish decisions (bad luck). These biases are driven by male evaluators. We find no gender differences in the attribution of high outcomes.

Diversity enables the jump towards cooperation for the Traveler’s Dilemma

Social dilemmas are situations in which collective welfare is at odds with individual gain. One widely studied example, due to the conflict it poses between human behaviour and game theoretic reasoning, is the Traveler’s Dilemma. The dilemma relies on the players’ incentive to undercut their opponent at the expense of losing a collective high payoff. Such individual incentive leads players to a systematic mutual undercutting until the lowest possible payoff is reached, which is the game’s unique Nash equilibrium. However, if players were satisfied with a high payoff -that is not necessarily higher than their opponent’s- they would both be better off individually and collectively. Here, we explain how it is possible to converge to this cooperative high payoff equilibrium. Our analysis focuses on decomposing the dilemma into a local and a global game. We show that players need to escape the local maximisation and jump to the global game, in order to reach the cooperative equilibrium. Using a dynamic approach, based on evolutionary game theory and learning theory models, we find that diversity, understood as the presence of suboptimal strategies, is the general mechanism that enables the jump towards cooperation.

On the effective peek application for customized cranio-maxillofacial prostheses: An experimental formability analysis

Single Point Incremental Forming (SPIF) is a dieless and flexible forming technology that allows performing complex shapes and presents a high economic payoff for low production series. In this context, this research presents an experimental investigation of Polyether ether ketone (PEEK) sheets deformed by SPIF at room temperature, determining the influence of the process parameters on the material formability. The research is performed in terms of principal strains that are evaluated within the material Forming Limit Diagram (FLD) obtained by means of Nakajima tests allowing to establish the forming limits of PEEK sheet material. On the other hand, the results of the SPIF tests performed gave rise to an analysis in terms of formability, modes of failure, temperature, forming force, and geometry accuracy. These experiments allow assessing the optimal parameters and forming methodologies/procedures for the manufacturing of cranio-maxillofacial prostheses. In this sense, it was performed a global study in terms of the formability of the manufactured prostheses, as well as the shape accuracy, temperature and roughness analysis, among others. This research showed that the maximum strains attainable by the two prostheses were still found far away from the Fracture Forming Limit (FFL) of the material, showing the feasibility to obtain extra formability within the forming safe zone. In conclusion, this work proved the high potential of manufacturing prostheses in the biomedical field using Incremental Sheet Forming (ISF) processes in combination with advanced biocompatible polymers such as PEEK.

Capitalism and Distributive Justice: Musings of a Mormon Economist

Capitalism and Distributive Justice: Musings of a Mormon Economist

Sequential Veto Bargaining With Incomplete Information

We study sequential bargaining between a proposer and a veto player. Both have single‐peaked preferences, but the proposer is uncertain about the veto player's ideal point. The proposer cannot commit to future proposals. When players are patient, there can be equilibria with Coasian dynamics: the veto player's private information can largely nullify proposer's bargaining power. Our main result, however, is that under some conditions there also are equilibria in which the proposer obtains the high payoff that he would with commitment power. The driving force is that the veto player's single‐peaked preferences give the proposer an option to “leapfrog,” that is, to secure agreement from only low‐surplus types early on to credibly extract surplus from high types later. Methodologically, we exploit the connection between sequential bargaining and static mechanism design.

Time-lagged effects of habitat fragmentation on terrestrial mammals in Madagascar.

Biodiversity is severely threatened by habitat destruction. As a consequence of habitat destruction, the remaining habitat becomes more fragmented. This results in time-lagged population extirpations in remaining fragments when these are too small to support populations in the long term. If these time-lagged effects are ignored, the long-term impacts of habitat loss and fragmentation will be underestimated. We quantified the magnitude of time-lagged effects of habitat fragmentation for 157 nonvolant terrestrial mammal species in Madagascar, one of the biodiversity hotspots with the highest rates of habitat loss and fragmentation. We refined species' geographic ranges based on habitat preferences and elevation limits and then estimated which habitat fragments were too small to support a population for at least 100 years given stochastic population fluctuations. We also evaluated whether time-lagged effects would change the threat status of species according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List assessment framework. We used allometric relationships to obtain the population parameters required to simulate the population dynamics of each species, and we quantified the consequences of uncertainty in these parameter estimates by repeating the analyses with a range of plausible parameter values. Based on the median outcomes, we found that for 34 species (22% of the 157 species) at least 10% of their current habitat contained unviable populations. Eight species (5%) had a higher threat status when accounting for time-lagged effects. Based on 0.95-quantile values, following a precautionary principle, for 108 species (69%) at least 10% of their habitat contained unviable populations, and 51 species (32%) had a higher threat status. Our results highlight the need to preserve continuous habitat and improve connectivity between habitat fragments. Moreover, our findings may help to identify species for which time-lagged effects are most severe and which may thus benefit the most from conservation actions.

‘What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important’: a study of the strategic implications of the urgency effect in a competitive setting

The urgency effect refers to people’s tendency to choose a relatively unimportant task (with unambiguously low payoff) over a relatively important task (with unambiguously high payoff), when the former is spuriously framed as urgent. In this paper I study a simple model in which two payoff-maximising task suppliers compete for a population of heterogeneous decision-makers. Task suppliers offer tasks of various importance, and can exert costly effort to manipulate the perceived urgency of the offered tasks. Decision-makers are of two kinds: they either choose more important over less important tasks by disregarding the urgency frames (fully rational) or behave like fully rational decision-makers, except that they are subject to the urgency effect (boundedly rational). I study the unique symmetric equilibrium of the resulting game and derive the conditions under which the urgency effect has detrimental effects on the decision-makers’ welfare. Furthermore, I examine the implications of several policies aimed at correcting the failure, which include educating boundedly rational decision-makers and auditing task suppliers that use urgency framing.

Investor sentiment and the MAX effect: evidence from Korea

ABSTRACT Stocks with extreme positive returns underperform the market since they are overpriced due to investors’ preference towards lottery-like stocks, stocks with a low probability of an extremely high payoff. Using data from the South Korean stock market, we show that the underperformance of such stocks is pronounced following periods of low investor sentiment. This suggests that low investor sentiment coincides with economic downturn when stocks with extreme positive returns experience increased salience and attention. We provide supporting evidence that stocks with extreme positive returns experience a substantial increase in trading volume and buying pressure from individual investors when investor sentiment is low.

Upside versus downside risk: Gender, stakes, and skewness

Risky choices often involve a tradeoff between expected payoff and payoff variability. Subjects in a simple experiment, however, exhibit more aversion to “downside risk” (with a small probability of a low payoff) and more attraction to “upside risk” (with a small probability of a high payoff). Women tend to be more averse than men for downside risk, but not for upside risk. These patterns are evaluated in terms of the utility curvature and probability weighting components of risk preferences. Gender differences in downside risk are relevant for the design of appropriately gender-tailored policies and algorithms for saving, financing, and entrepreneurship.

Bayesian Games with Rationally Inattentive Players

We study how scarcity of attention affects strategic choice behaviour in a 2-player incomplete information entry game. Scarcity of attention is a common psychological character among population ( Kahnemann, 1973 , Attention and effort, Prentice Hall), and it is modelled by the rational inattention approach introduced by Sims (1998 , Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, 49, 317–356). In this game, players acquire information about their private payoff shocks at a cost, which follows a high-low binary distribution. We find that high information cost can generate multiple equilibria, and the number of equilibria differs with respect to different ranges of information cost. The number of equilibria could be 1, 5 or 3. Increasing the information cost could encourage or discourage a player to choose entry in some equilibria. This depends on whether the prior probability of high payoff shocks is greater than a given threshold value. We also exhibit a necessary and sufficient condition of parameter specification such that with the same set of parameters satisfying this condition, both the rational inattention Bayesian game and a Bayesian quantal response equilibrium game where the observation errors are additive and follow a Type-I extreme value distribution can have a common equilibrium. JEL: C72, D91

Energy consumption, carbon emissions, product cost, and process time in incremental sheet forming process: A holistic review from sustainability perspective

Due to continuous worsening of the environment and depletion of natural resources, concept of sustainability in manufacturing sector is gaining an increasing attention. New processes and strategies characterized by efficient use of energy and materials, low processing time and zero or nearly zero green-house emissions are being explored. Incremental sheet forming (ISF) is a comparatively new sheet forming process with high economic payoff for small production runs and customized orders. The current study presents a comprehensive review on the sustainability aspects of the process. The process performance in terms of power demand, energy consumption, cost, CO2 emissions, processing time, and material wastage/usage is analyzed on the basis of published literature, and important conclusions and recommendations are drawn to utilize the process for cleaner, economical and time efficient production. The review establishes that ISF is more sustainable process than conventional forming methods for small production runs. Further, its sustainability performance can be further enhanced by choosing optimum process conditions especially lower spindle rotation, larger feed rate and step size. Shorter tool paths and advent of energy efficient machines is likely to further elevate the process performance. The review also identifies future work and presents fundamental guidelines and recommendations for establishing the sustainable ISF process.

Explaining Excess Entry in Winner-Take-All Markets

We report experimental data from standard market entry games and winner-take-all games. At odds with traditional decision-making models with risk aversion, the winner-take-all condition results in substantially more entry than the expected-payoff-equivalent market entry game. We explore three candidate explanations for excess entry: blind spot, illusion of control, and joy of winning, none of which receive empirical support. We provide a novel theoretical explanation for excess entry based on cumulative prospect theory and test it empirically. Our results suggest that excess entry into highly competitive environments is not caused by a genuine preference for competing, but is instead driven by probability weighting. Market entrants overweight the small probabilities associated with the high payoff outcomes in winner-take-all markets, while they underweight probable failures. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: This work was supported by the Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung [Grants 100018_182185 and 26022621] and the Dr. h.c. Emil Zaugg-Fonds [Grant B11162135]. Supplemental Material: The data files and e-companion are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4397 .

Hunger and environmental goals for Asia: Synergies and trade-offs among the SDGs

Rapid progress in hunger reduction in Asia has come at the cost of environmental degradation, while pursuing environmental conservation goals risk slowing further progress on hunger. Operationalizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) shows us the complexity of achieving multiple societal goals simultaneously. The lack of coordination across sector-specific agencies responsible for various SDGs has aggravated the problem. This paper presents the challenge of seeking a nexus across the SDGs with particular reference to the SDG target 2.3., “Doubling productivity and Incomes”. A detailed assessment, with respect to South Asia, of the synergies and tradeoffs between SDG 2.3 and the other SDG targets is provided. High payoff interventions and policies for maximizing the positive linkages and minimizing the negative linkages with SDG 2.3 are discussed.

Framing is a motivated process.

Frames group choices into categories, thus modifying the incentives for them. This effect makes framing itself a motivated choice rather than a neutral cognition. In particular, framing an inferior choice with a high short-term payoff as part of a broad category of choices recruits incentive to reject it; but this must be motivated by its being a test case.

Measuring happiness under interpersonal comparison: An advanced theoretical framework and implications.

The origin of happiness arouses people’s curiosity for a long time. Recent research introduces a utility theory for measuring subjective happiness in a social context. The past recent monetary conditions influence the present subjective happiness through two distinct channels: interpersonal comparison and self-adaptation. In this paper, we develop this theory to analyze behavioral patterns. Together with prospect theory’s gain-loss utility function, we exploit the theory in predicting psychological phenomena of craving. We explore the relationships between happiness and earnings. Under certain conditions, a high payoff disappoints you immediately and even leads to continuous disappointment across periods. We extend the explanations of the scenarios of New York cabdrivers’ labor-supply decisions. The effect of social comparisons may trigger workers’ behaviors of quit-working, which deepen related understandings of the literature.