Non-cooperative Behavior Research Articles

Nash rationalization of collective choice over lotteries

To test the joint hypothesis that players in a noncooperative game (allowing mixtures over pure strategies) consult an independent preference relation and select a Nash equilibrium, it suffices to study the reaction of the revealed collective choice upon changes in the space of strategies available to the players. The joint hypothesis is supported if the revealed choices satisfy an extended version of Richter’s congruence axiom together with a contraction–expansion axiom that models the noncooperative behavior. In addition, we provide sufficient and necessary conditions for a binary relation to have an independent ordering extension, and for individual choices over lotteries to be rationalizable by an independent preference relation.

Diminished cooperativeness of psychopaths in a prisoner's dilemma game yields higher rewards.

Maladaptive social behavior is one of the defining characteristics of psychopathic personality disorder. Nevertheless, maladaptive social behavior has only rarely been observed among psychopaths in experimentally controlled situations. The authors assessed the behavior of criminal psychopaths from high-security psychiatric hospitals in a computer simulation of a social dilemma situation. The psychopaths showed a markedly higher proneness to competitive (i.e., noncooperative) behavior than did healthy adults from the general population. The odds ratio between defection and being a psychopath was estimated at 7.86 in the sample. The probability to choose selfish instead of cooperative behavior was significantly linked to the following subscales of the Psychopathy Personality Inventory-Revised (S. O. Lilienfeld & M. R. Widows, 2005): rebellious nonconformity, Machiavellian egocentricity, and the total score. On average, the psychopathic participants accumulated higher gain and more strongly exploited their counterpart than did the healthy participants.

J. Timmons Roberts and Bradley C. Parks, A Climate of Injustice: Global Inequality, North–South Politics, and Climate Policy

In their superb contribution to scholarly and political debates about the future of international efforts to cope with climate change, J. Timmons Roberts and Bradley C. Parks offer a carefully developed, richly documented, and convincingly supported account of the origins, dynamics, and implications of the current North–South impasse. In contrast to most mainstream international environmental political approaches to the topic, the authors place inequality at the center of their argument. In order to understand generalized mistrust and diametrically opposed notions of fairness among climate change negotiators, Roberts and Parks call attention to the ‘‘triple inequality’’ of responsibility for human-induced climate change, vulnerability to its consequences, and mitigation of its impacts. This perspective, which is ultimately tied to developing countries’ colonial history and their resulting marginalization in the international political economy, implies that climate justice is inextricably linked to broader economic development concerns. Consequently, the authors suggest, any attempt to come to terms with climate change mitigation and adaptation will need to address the root cause of climate injustice. The theoretical breadth, systematic development, and empirical richness of A Climate of Injustice makes this book required reading for scholars, students, and practitioners alike. Roberts and Parks posit two causal paths through which inequality drives noncooperative behavior between the North and South. The first involves poverty and powerlessness which directly deprive developing countries of the technical, financial, and administrative capacity to effectively negotiate with the North and meaningfully address their own greenhouse gas emissions. The second path, analyzed in greater depth, evolves around the historical experience of poorer nations, which has produced and reinforced a worldview at odds with that of richer nations, generating widespread mistrust, risk aversion, and divergent expectations about how to address climate change. During the last three decades, the authors argue, the North’s persistent ‘‘callousness and opportunism’’ in matters relating to international political economy has spilled over into international environmental politics, where countries of the South use the unprecedented leverage they possess.

To be or not to be trusted: The influence of media richness on defection and deception

When business transactions take place between strangers, individuals rely on the cues during communication to determine whether they can trust others’ intentions. How that process occurs in the context of computer-mediated, video-mediated, and face-to-face interactions is still somewhat unknown. We examine how media richness influences both affective-based and cognitive-based trust in the context of two studies with two different social dilemma scenarios. Further, we explore how these two types of trust influence not only non-cooperative behavior (defection) but also lying (deception). Results from the first study suggest cognitive-based trust mediates the relationship between media richness and defection, while results from both studies suggest that affective-based trust mediates the relationship between media richness and deception. Video-mediated communication solves some, but not all, of the problems inherent when interacting via communication technology.

The “tragedy of tourism resources” as the outcome of a strategic game: A new analytical framework

Game theory is rarely used to deal with the overuse and misuse of tourism resources. When it happens, the issue is normally explained within a non-cooperative setting in which, because of the free riding option, a problem emerges as the socially irrational outcome of an individually rational behaviour (social dilemma). In some cases, the assumptions upon which this explanation rests risk lacking both descriptive accuracy and predictive power. Since tourism is the encounter of a stable (residents) with a changing (tourists) population, the paper asserts that, in many cases, the issue may be better investigated within a strategic game in which the players do not know an aspect of their environment that is important for their choice (Bayesian game). Building on this, the paper demonstrates why an unsustainable path may emerge even when both players prefer preservation to exploitation and no free ride incentive exists. Then, it addresses some policy issues to prevent the dreaded result that non-cooperative behaviour would yield.

When behavior matters: Games and computation in A Behavioral Theory of the Firm

A Behavioral Theory of the Firm presents a computational model of a duopoly that is based on observations of firm behavior and that incorporates a range of behavioral constructs. Because this model is starkly different from the traditional game-theoretic analysis of duopoly, it useful to compare the performance of a game-theoretic version of this model, shorn of all behavioral constructs, with the original Cyert and March paradigm. To do this we calibrate the game-theoretic model with all the economic components of the computational model, and we assume that firms could choose either cooperative or non-cooperative strategies. We find that the pricing strategy of the computational firms is similar to that found in a non-cooperative game-theoretic outcome and that the advertising choice of the computational firms is less than what non-cooperative or cooperative game-theoretic behavior would predict. We also consider how initializing the choices of the computational firm with those of the game-theoretic firms affects their performance. Informing the computational firms in this way led to greater changes in advertising than pricing strategies; profits of the computational firms were greatest when their initial choices were those found in a non-cooperative equilibrium.

Die EU-Zinsenrichtlinie: Ein Schuss in den Ofen?

Abstract: The ultimate aim of the EU Savings Tax Directive is the effective taxation of interest income. The EU has switched with the Directive from a policy which was based on trust in the citizens and on a certain degree of self-determination, to a procedure which is characterized by distrust and monitoring. On the other hand the Directive's regulations which focus on the classical behavioural determinants of tax evasion seem to be insufficient. In sum, it is possible that the Directive has failed to achieve its goal. The integral mechanism of the Directive is tax-related information exchange. Since tax-related information exchange is a strategic variable for the member states to adjust the attractiveness of their financial markets, it is debatable whether existing loopholes in the national implementations are the result of hidden non-cooperative behaviour of the member states.

Iterated Cooperation and Possible Deviations between Liner Shipping Carriers Based on Noncooperative Game Theory

The top liner shipping carriers have already established alliances in the shipping industry and are investigating new business connections with customers, suppliers, competitors, consultants, and other companies. Several studies have attempted to explain this phenomenon using a variety of conceptual and theoretical frameworks. This paper focuses on liner shipping strategic alliances and their establishment and transformation within the framework of noncooperative game theory, which is considered an effective tool to analyze motivations, competitive structures, strategies, and potential payoffs in a number of industries, including the turbulent liner shipping industry. Not only can a liner shipping company be seen as a player in a shipping alliance, but a liner shipping strategic alliance itself can be viewed as a player when it competes with other alliances. In this paper, more attention is paid to the former situation by assuming that those liner companies are unable to make enforceable contracts through outside parties. This paper aims to (a) indicate the motivations for short-term cooperation among several liner carriers, (b) analyze the pros and cons of being a member of a liner shipping strategic alliance, (c) explain a player's deviation or departure behavior when it faces turbulence and unpredictable shipping circumstances, and (d) recommend ways to enhance long-term alliance stability by increasing benefits while decreasing drawbacks. Of those four main points, the differences between short-term cooperation and long-term alliance are the number of subgames and the potential future payoff. Specific models based on the assumption of noncooperative behavior are set up as iterated games to give those differences clear explanations. The outcome of this paper will be helpful for liner shipping carriers attempting to succeed in the shipping industry with greater efficiency, better customer service, and lower cost.

A game-theoretic analysis of denial of service attacks in wireless random access

In wireless access, transmitter nodes need to make individual decisions for distributed operation and do not necessarily cooperate with each other. We consider a single-receiver random access system of non-cooperative transmitters with the individual objectives of optimizing their throughput rewards, transmission energy costs and delay costs. The non-cooperative transmitter behavior may be purely selfish or may also reflect malicious objectives of generating interference to prevent the successful transmissions of the other nodes as a form of denial of service attack. Our goal is to evaluate the interactions between selfish and malicious nodes that have the dual objectives of optimizing their individual performance measures and blocking the packet transmissions of the other selfish nodes. We assume saturated packet queues of infinite buffer capacities and consider a general multi-packet reception channel that allows packet captures in the presence of simultaneous transmissions. In this context, we formulate a non-cooperative random access game of selecting the individual probabilities of transmitting packets to a common receiver. We derive the non-cooperative transmission strategies in Nash equilibrium. The analysis provides insights for the optimal strategies to block random access of selfish nodes as well as the optimal defense mechanisms against the possible denial of service attacks of malicious nodes in wireless networks. The results are also compared with the cooperative equilibrium strategies that optimize the total system utility (separately under random access and scheduled access). A pricing scheme is presented to improve the non-cooperative operation. For distributed implementation, we formulate a repeated game of the best-response strategy updates and introduce adaptive heuristics (based on the channel feedback only) provided that the system parameters are not explicitly known at the individual transmitters.

Stimulating Node Cooperation in Mobile Ad hoc Networks

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) rely on the cooperation of nodes for packet routing and forwarding. Much of the existing work in MANETs assume that mobile nodes (possibly owned by selfish users) will follow prescribed protocols without deviation. However, a user may misbehave due to several advantages resulting from noncooperation, the most obvious being power saving. As such, the network availability is severely endangered. Hence, enforcing the cooperation among nodes becomes a very important issue. Several different approaches have been developed to detect non-cooperative nodes or deal with the non-cooperative behavior of mobile nodes in MANETs. These protocols are first surveyed in details in this paper. It is found that the proposed approaches have several concerns that prevent them from really enforcing the node cooperation in MANETs. Thus, a new scheme that can stimulate and also enforce nodes to cooperate in a selfish ad hoc environment is presented. We also present a mechanism to detect and exclude potential threats of selfish mobile nodes. The simulation results indicate that by using the proposed scheme, MANETs can be robust against nodes' misbehaving and the performance of the network is enhanced many folds when compared to other existing schemes.

Strategic technology choice in regulated markets with demand uncertainty

This paper presents a simple model of a non-competitive market with demand uncertainty in which firms can choose their technology of production. Technology is characterised by two parameters: capacity and flexibility. The first has a strong commitment value while flexibility is needed to face uncertainty. Lack of competition requires active regulation to ensure that the price is not set at excessive level. When choosing their technology, firms take into account not only the effects of this choice on the opponent(s) but also the effect on the regulated price. In this framework, and because of regulation, firms have an incentive to strategically manipulate their cost (cost padding). This causes monopoly regulation aiming at improving allocative efficiency to be ineffective. In fact, by “tying its hand” to a low level of capacity, the monopolistic firm is able to get round the constraint imposed by the regulator. Increasing the number of firms in the market may restore regulation effectiveness. The reason is that if demand is sufficiently volatile, then firms strategically choose flexible techniques and this effect dominates over the incentive to manipulate costs in order to escape regulation. In this case, regulation is effective precisely because cost padding is hampered by firms’ non-cooperative behaviour.

EU agri‐environmental programs and the “restaurant table effect”

AbstractThe share of agricultural area enrolled in EU agri‐environmental programs varies significantly between EU member states. These national differences are explained, based on a model that reflects both, that these programs internalize externalities and the political economy. We identify six factors that affect the extent to which agri‐environmental programs are implemented: environmental benefits, opportunity costs of participation, budgetary pressure, the share of program expenditures financed by the EU, the political weight attributed to farmers at the national, and the political influence of each country at the EU level. In addition, we demonstrate that, if the policy decision‐making process is noncooperative at the EU level, countries that contribute less to the EU budget will ceteris paribus implement more programs. Using data of four years and feasible generalized least square methods, we are able to confirm our theoretical results including a noncooperative behavior of EU member states.

Dental treatment of a 2‐year‐old victim of a suicide bomb attack

The purpose of this report was to describe the diagnosis and dental treatment of a 2-year-old girl that was involved in a suicide bomb attack. A 14-months-old infant was severely injured when a suicide bomber detonated an explosive device inside a crowded bus. Her injury was 'multi-system', mainly burns and fragments in her face, eyes and other parts of the body. Fifteen months later, she was brought to the Department of Pediatric Dentistry of the Hadassah School of Dental Medicine and the clinical and radiographic examination showed that she was caries free but there were dental trauma injuries to many teeth. Due to her non-cooperative behavior and the extent of treatment the girl was scheduled for a one appointment treatment under deep sedation. Three days later, she was brought to the Emergency Room of the Department of Pediatric Dentistry complaining of pain on the lower left side of the mouth and a swollen vestibule and face could clinically be observed. The lower left first molar that apparently revealed only an enamel fracture and cracks at the time of treatment, actually revealed a necrotic pulp as a result of the blast. As this girl was caries free, and with no history of dental trauma due to any accident, the only explanation for the response of the pulp was the impact of the blast. In conclusion, the reaction of the dental pulp to the blast of an explosion is different than the reaction to other kind of insult and this should be taken in consideration when treating children after this kind of dental trauma.

Guest Editorial Non-Cooperative Behavior in Networking

The 17 papers in this special issue focus on non-cooperative behavior in networking. They deal with non-cooperative behaviors arising from a wide variety of networks: cellular, wireless LAN, ad hoc networks and wireline networks. From a protocol layering perspective, they address game-theoretic issues in (1) modulation, power control, and subchannel assignment in the physical later, (2) contention window in the MAC layer, (3) multihoming and routing in the network layer, and (4) resource allocation.

Distributed Contention Window Control for Selfish Users in IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs

In this paper, we study non-cooperative user behavior in random-access wireless networks in which users have freedom to choose their back-off contention window size according to network's congestion status. We formulate a non- cooperative game and show the existence and uniqueness of its equilibrium point. We also propose an iterative method leading to the equilibrium point of the game. A discussion of alternative game formulations in the same problem context is also given.

When punishment fails: Research on sanctions, intentions and non-cooperation

People can become less cooperative when threatened with sanctions, and previous research suggests both “intentions” and incentives underlie this effect. We report data from an experiment aimed at determining the relative importance of intentions and incentives in producing non-cooperative behavior. Participants play a one-shot investment experiment in pairs. Investors send an amount to trustees, request a return on this investment and, in some treatments, can threaten sanctions to enforce their requests. Decisions by trustees facing threats imposed (or not) by investors are compared to decisions by trustees facing threats imposed (or not) by nature. When not threatened, trustees typically decide to return a positive amount less than the investor requested. When threatened this decision becomes least common. If the request is large relative to the sanction then most trustees return nothing. If the request is small, trustees typically return the requested amount. These results do not vary with investors' intentions.

Attention bias toward noncooperative people. A dot probe classification study in cheating detection

Evolution-inspired research assumes the existence of brain mechanisms that scan for information that might signal noncooperative behavior. In this study, we demonstrate an automatic attention bias for threatening social interactions involving untrustworthy partners. Using a dot probe classification task, we found that, compared to unknown cooperators, attention was oriented significantly more toward the faces of unknown players who decided not to cooperate during a Prisoner's Dilemma Game. The present results thus suggest that an automatic, preconscious focus of attention underlies our ability to identify noncooperative players in social exchange situations.

An oracle based method to compute a coupled equilibrium in a model of international climate policy

This paper proposes a computational game-theoretic model for the international negotiations that should take place at the end of the period covered by the Kyoto protocol. These negotiations could lead to a self-enforcing agreement on a burden sharing scheme given the necessary global emissions limit that will be imposed when the real extent of climate change is known. The model assumes a non-cooperative behavior of the parties except for the fact that they will be collectively committed to reach a target on total cumulative emissions by the year 2050. The concept of normalized equilibrium, introduced by J.B. Rosen for concave games with coupled constraints, is used to characterize a family of dynamic equilibrium solutions in an m-player game where the agents are (groups of) countries and the payoffs are the welfare gains obtained from a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model. The model deals with the uncertainty about climate sensitivity by computing an S-adapted equilibrium. These equilibria are computed using an oracle-based method permitting an implicit definition of the payoffs to the different players, obtained through simulations performed with the global CGE model GEMINI-E3.

A Fuzzy Stochastic Dynamic Nash Game Analysis of Policies for Managing Water Allocation in a Reservoir System

In this paper a fuzzy dynamic Nash game model of interactions between water users in a reservoir system is presented. The model represents a fuzzy stochastic non-cooperative game in which water users are grouped into four players, where each player in game chooses its individual policies to maximize expected utility. The model is used to present empirical results about a real case water allocation from a reservoir, considering player (water user) non-cooperative behavior and also same level of information availability for individual players. According to the results an optimal allocation policy for each water user can be developed in addition to the optimal policy of the reservoir system. Also the proposed model is compared with two alternative dynamic models of reservoir optimization, namely Stochastic Dynamic Programming (SDP) and Fuzzy-State Stochastic Dynamic programming (FSDP). The proposed modeling procedures can be applied as an appropriate tool for reservoir operation, considering the interaction among the water users as well as the water users and reservoir operator.

Executive Inhibitory Control and Cooperative Behavior During Early School Years: A Follow-Up Study

Several links between aspects of executive functioning and the development of social competence have been established. The present study investigates the relation between executive inhibitory control and cooperative/non-cooperative behavior, in an ecological setting, and from a longitudinal perspective. Elementary school children (n=195) of three age groups (7, 9, 11 years, initially) were measured at two consecutive time points, at a one-year interval, with tasks tapping executive inhibitory control (the Stroop test), and social competence (a collaborative puzzle solving task). Executive inhibition was identified as the most influential stable predictor only in the case of non-cooperative behavior and presented strong concurrent relations with both cooperative and non-cooperative behavior at follow-up, even when controlling for previous level of the same behavior. The findings imply the need to consider the important role of executive inhibitory processes in multifactorial models of social competence development and in the refinement of present interventions.