The “collective action problem†describes situations where each person in a group can individually profit more by withholding contributions to group goals. However, if all act in their material self-interest no public good is produced and all are worse off. I present a new solution to...

We study prisoner’s dilemmas played in continuous time with flow payoffs over 60 seconds. In most cases, the median rate of mutual cooperation rises to 90% or more. Control sessions with 8-time repeated matchings achieve less than half as much cooperation, and cooperation rates...

The author develops a new game-theoretic approach, anchored not in Boolean two-valued logic but instead in linguistic fuzzy logic. The latter is characterized by two key features. First, the truth values of logical propositions span a set of linguistic terms such as true, very true, almost...

This essay offers an exposition of the potential uses of game theoretic reasoning and mathematical models in the study of the prevention of nuclear war.

Water management strategies in times of global change need to be developed within a complex and uncertain environment. Scenarios are often used to deal with uncertainty. A novel backcasting methodology has been tested in which a normative objective (e.g. adaptive water management) is backcasted...

This paper presents a game-theoretic rationale for the beneficial effect of a common enemy on cooperation. In a defence game against a common natural threat, the value of the public good of defence is equal to the sum of the players’ defensive efforts. The game therefore takes the form of...

A number of experimental studies have investigated whether cooperative behavior may emerge in multi-agent Q-learning. In some studies cooperative behavior did emerge, in others it did not. This report provides a theoretical analysis of this issue. The analysis focuses on multi-agent Q-learning...

A recent line of research in economics and psychology hypothesizes that differences in national average intelligence, proxied by IQ tests, are important drivers of national economic outcomes. Cross-country regressions, while showing a robust IQ-growth relationship, cannot fully test this...

Models based on agents has been widely used to study the paradigmatic emergence of cooperation in social systems. In the Spatial Prisoners' Dilemma game introduced by Martin Nowak and Robert May, the agents are greedy and imitate indiscriminately the action of the wealthiest neighbor. Other...