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Book The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure

Download or read book The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure written by Brian Skyrms and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brian Skyrms, author of the successful Evolution of the Social Contract (which won the prestigious Lakatos Award) has written a sequel. The book is a study of ideas of cooperation and collective action. The point of departure is a prototypical story found in Rousseau's A Discourse on Inequality. Rousseau contrasts the pay-off of hunting hare where the risk of non-cooperation is small but the reward is equally small, against the pay-off of hunting the stag where maximum cooperation is required but where the reward is so much greater. Thus, rational agents are pulled in one direction by considerations of risk and in another by considerations of mutual benefit. Written with Skyrms's characteristic clarity and verve, this intriguing book will be eagerly sought out by students and professionals in philosophy, political science, economics, sociology and evolutionary biology.

Book The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure

Download or read book The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure written by Brian Skyrms and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brian Skyrms, author of the successful Evolution of the Social Contract (which won the prestigious Lakatos Award) has written a sequel. The book is a study of ideas of cooperation and collective action. The point of departure is a prototypical story found in Rousseau's A Discourse on Inequality. Rousseau contrasts the pay-off of hunting hare where the risk of non-cooperation is small but the reward is equally small, against the pay-off of hunting the stag where maximum cooperation is required but where the reward is so much greater. Thus, rational agents are pulled in one direction by considerations of risk and in another by considerations of mutual benefit. Written with Skyrms's characteristic clarity and verve, this intriguing book will be eagerly sought out by students and professionals in philosophy, political science, economics, sociology and evolutionary biology.

Book Evolution of the Social Contract

Download or read book Evolution of the Social Contract written by Brian Skyrms and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-30 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new edition further develops the application of evolutionary game theory to an analysis of the origins of social contracts.

Book Social Dynamics

Download or read book Social Dynamics written by Brian Skyrms and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-04 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brian Skyrms applies adaptive dynamics (of cultural evolution and individual learning) to social theory, investigating altruism, spite, fairness, trust, division of labor, and signaling. Correlation is seen to be fundamental. Spontaneous emergence of social structure and of signaling systems are examined in the context of learning dynamics.

Book Signals

    Book Details:
  • Author : Brian Skyrms
  • Publisher : Oxford University Press
  • Release : 2010-04-08
  • ISBN : 0199580820
  • Pages : 208 pages

Download or read book Signals written by Brian Skyrms and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-08 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brian Skyrms offers a fascinating demonstration of how fundamental signals are to our world. He uses various scientific tools to investigate how meaning and communication develop. Signals operate in networks of senders and receivers at all levels of life, transmitting and processing information. That is how humans and animals think and interact.

Book Cultural Evolution

    Book Details:
  • Author : Peter J. Richerson
  • Publisher : MIT Press
  • Release : 2024-04-30
  • ISBN : 026255190X
  • Pages : 499 pages

Download or read book Cultural Evolution written by Peter J. Richerson and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-04-30 with total page 499 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading scholars report on current research that demonstrates the central role of cultural evolution in explaining human behavior. Over the past few decades, a growing body of research has emerged from a variety of disciplines to highlight the importance of cultural evolution in understanding human behavior. Wider application of these insights, however, has been hampered by traditional disciplinary boundaries. To remedy this, in this volume leading researchers from theoretical biology, developmental and cognitive psychology, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, religious studies, history, and economics come together to explore the central role of cultural evolution in different aspects of human endeavor. The contributors take as their guiding principle the idea that cultural evolution can provide an important integrating function across the various disciplines of the human sciences, as organic evolution does for biology. The benefits of adopting a cultural evolutionary perspective are demonstrated by contributions on social systems, technology, language, and religion. Topics covered include enforcement of norms in human groups, the neuroscience of technology, language diversity, and prosociality and religion. The contributors evaluate current research on cultural evolution and consider its broader theoretical and practical implications, synthesizing past and ongoing work and sketching a roadmap for future cross-disciplinary efforts. Contributors Quentin D. Atkinson, Andrea Baronchelli, Robert Boyd, Briggs Buchanan, Joseph Bulbulia, Morten H. Christiansen, Emma Cohen, William Croft, Michael Cysouw, Dan Dediu, Nicholas Evans, Emma Flynn, Pieter François, Simon Garrod, Armin W. Geertz, Herbert Gintis, Russell D. Gray, Simon J. Greenhill, Daniel B. M. Haun, Joseph Henrich, Daniel J. Hruschka, Marco A. Janssen, Fiona M. Jordan, Anne Kandler, James A. Kitts, Kevin N. Laland, Laurent Lehmann, Stephen C. Levinson, Elena Lieven, Sarah Mathew, Robert N. McCauley, Alex Mesoudi, Ara Norenzayan, Harriet Over, Jürgen Renn, Victoria Reyes-García, Peter J. Richerson, Stephen Shennan, Edward G. Slingerland, Dietrich Stout, Claudio Tennie, Peter Turchin, Carel van Schaik, Matthijs Van Veelen, Harvey Whitehouse, Thomas Widlok, Polly Wiessner, David Sloan Wilson

Book Game Theory and the Law

    Book Details:
  • Author : Douglas G. Baird
  • Publisher : Harvard University Press
  • Release : 1994
  • ISBN : 9780674341111
  • Pages : 348 pages

Download or read book Game Theory and the Law written by Douglas G. Baird and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first to apply the tools of game theory and information economics to advance our understanding of how laws work. Organized around the major solution concepts of game theory, it shows how such well known games as the prisoner's dilemma, the battle of the sexes, beer-quiche, and the Rubinstein bargaining game can illuminate many different kinds of legal problems. Game Theory and the Law highlights the basic mechanisms at work and lays out a natural progression in the sophistication of the game concepts and legal problems considered.

Book How We Cooperate

    Book Details:
  • Author : John E. Roemer
  • Publisher : Yale University Press
  • Release : 2019-04-23
  • ISBN : 0300233337
  • Pages : 249 pages

Download or read book How We Cooperate written by John E. Roemer and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new theory of how and why we cooperate, drawing from economics, political theory, and philosophy to challenge the conventional wisdom of game theory Game theory explains competitive behavior by working from the premise that people are self-interested. People don't just compete, however; they also cooperate. John Roemer argues that attempts by orthodox game theorists to account for cooperation leave much to be desired. Unlike competing players, cooperating players take those actions that they would like others to take--which Roemer calls "Kantian optimization." Through rigorous reasoning and modeling, Roemer demonstrates a simpler theory of cooperative behavior than the standard model provides.

Book The Dynamics of Rational Deliberation

Download or read book The Dynamics of Rational Deliberation written by Brian Skyrms and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brian Skyrms constructs a theory of "dynamic deliberation" and uses it to investigate rational decisionmaking in cases of strategic interaction. This illuminating book will be of great interest to all those in many disciplines who use decision theory and game theory to study human behavior and thought. Skyrms begins by discussing the Bayesian theory of individual rational decision and the classical theory of games, which at first glance seem antithetical in the criteria used for determining action. In his effort to show how methods for dealing with information feedback can be productively combined, the author skillfully leads us through the mazes of equilibrium selection, the Nash equilibria for normal and extensive forms, structural stability, causal decision theory, dynamic probability, the revision of beliefs, and, finally, good habits for decision. The author provides many clarifying illustrations and a handy appendix called "Deliberational Dynamics on Your Personal Computer." His powerful model has important implications for understanding the rational origins of convention and the social contract, the logic of nuclear deterrence, the theory of good habits, and the varied strategies of political and economic behavior.

Book Complex Systems in the Social and Behavioral Sciences

Download or read book Complex Systems in the Social and Behavioral Sciences written by L. Douglas Kiel and published by . This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Complexity systems are at the heart of behavior

Book Fundamentals of Evolutionary Game Theory and its Applications

Download or read book Fundamentals of Evolutionary Game Theory and its Applications written by Jun Tanimoto and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-10-23 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ​This book both summarizes the basic theory of evolutionary games and explains their developing applications, giving special attention to the 2-player, 2-strategy game. This game, usually termed a "2×2 game” in the jargon, has been deemed most important because it makes it possible to posit an archetype framework that can be extended to various applications for engineering, the social sciences, and even pure science fields spanning theoretical biology, physics, economics, politics, and information science. The 2×2 game is in fact one of the hottest issues in the field of statistical physics. The book first shows how the fundamental theory of the 2×2 game, based on so-called replicator dynamics, highlights its potential relation with nonlinear dynamical systems. This analytical approach implies that there is a gap between theoretical and reality-based prognoses observed in social systems of humans as well as in those of animal species. The book explains that this perceived gap is the result of an underlying reciprocity mechanism called social viscosity. As a second major point, the book puts a sharp focus on network reciprocity, one of the five fundamental mechanisms for adding social viscosity to a system and one that has been a great concern for study by statistical physicists in the past decade. The book explains how network reciprocity works for emerging cooperation, and readers can clearly understand the existence of substantial mechanics when the term "network reciprocity" is used. In the latter part of the book, readers will find several interesting examples in which evolutionary game theory is applied. One such example is traffic flow analysis. Traffic flow is one of the subjects that fluid dynamics can deal with, although flowing objects do not comprise a pure fluid but, rather, are a set of many particles. Applying the framework of evolutionary games to realistic traffic flows, the book reveals that social dilemma structures lie behind traffic flow.

Book Chinese Small Property

Download or read book Chinese Small Property written by Shitong Qiao and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-19 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Qiao demonstrates how an impersonal and unbounded market can operate without legal protection or enforcement of property and contract rights.

Book Model Based Reasoning in Science and Technology

Download or read book Model Based Reasoning in Science and Technology written by Ángel Nepomuceno-Fernández and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-10-24 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses how scientific and other types of cognition make use of models, abduction, and explanatory reasoning in order to produce important and innovative changes in theories and concepts. Gathering revised contributions presented at the international conference on Model-Based Reasoning (MBR18), held on October 24–26 2018 in Seville, Spain, the book is divided into three main parts. The first focuses on models, reasoning, and representation. It highlights key theoretical concepts from an applied perspective, and addresses issues concerning information visualization, experimental methods, and design. The second part goes a step further, examining abduction, problem solving, and reasoning. The respective papers assess different types of reasoning, and discuss various concepts of inference and creativity and their relationship with experimental data. In turn, the third part reports on a number of epistemological and technological issues. By analyzing possible contradictions in modern research and describing representative case studies, this part is intended to foster new discussions and stimulate new ideas. All in all, the book provides researchers and graduate students in the fields of applied philosophy, epistemology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence alike with an authoritative snapshot of the latest theories and applications of model-based reasoning.

Book The Royal Hunt in Eurasian History

Download or read book The Royal Hunt in Eurasian History written by Thomas T. Allsen and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-06-03 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From antiquity to the nineteenth century, the royal hunt was a vital component of the political cultures of the Middle East, India, Central Asia, and China. Besides marking elite status, royal hunts functioned as inspection tours and imperial progresses, a means of asserting kingly authority over the countryside. The hunt was, in fact, the "court out-of-doors," an open-air theater for displays of majesty, the entertainment of guests, and the bestowal of favor on subjects. In the conduct of interstate relations, great hunts were used to train armies, show the flag, and send diplomatic signals. Wars sometimes began as hunts and ended as celebratory chases. Often understood as a kind of covert military training, the royal hunt was subject to the same strict discipline as that applied in war and was also a source of innovation in military organization and tactics. Just as human subjects were to recognize royal power, so was the natural kingdom brought within the power structure by means of the royal hunt. Hunting parks were centers of botanical exchange, military depots, early conservation reserves, and important links in local ecologies. The mastery of the king over nature served an important purpose in official renderings: as a manifestation of his possession of heavenly good fortune he could tame the natural world and keep his kingdom safe from marauding threats, human or animal. The exchanges of hunting partners—cheetahs, elephants, and even birds—became diplomatic tools as well as serving to create an elite hunting culture that transcended political allegiances and ecological frontiers. This sweeping comparative work ranges from ancient Egypt to India under the Raj. With a magisterial command of contemporary sources, literature, material culture, and archaeology, Thomas T. Allsen chronicles the vast range of traditions surrounding this fabled royal occupation.

Book An Essay on the History of Civil Society

Download or read book An Essay on the History of Civil Society written by Adam Ferguson and published by . This book was released on 1767 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Agents  Games  and Evolution

Download or read book Agents Games and Evolution written by Steven Orla Kimbrough and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2011-12-19 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Games, or contexts of strategic interaction, pervade and suffuse our lives and the lives of all organisms. How are we to make sense of and cope with such situations? How should an agent play? When will and when won't cooperation arise and be maintained? Using examples and a careful digestion of the literature, Agents, Games, and Evolution: Strategies at Work and Play addresses these encompassing themes throughout, and is organized into four parts: Part I introduces classical game theory and strategy selection. It compares ideally rational and the "naturalist" approach used by this book, which focuses on how actual agents chose their strategies, and the effects of these strategies on model systems. Part II explores a number of basic games, using models in which agents have fixed strategies. This section draws heavily on the substantial literature associated with the relevant application areas in the social sciences. Part III reviews core results and applications of agent-based models in which strategic interaction is present and for which design issues have genuine practical import. This section draws heavily on the substantial literature associated with the application area to hand. Part IV addresses miscellaneous topics in strategic interaction, including lying in negotiations, reasoning by backward induction, and evolutionary models. Modelled after the authors' Agents, Games, and Evolution course at the University of Pennsylvania, this book keeps mathematics to a minimum, focusing on computational strategies and useful methods for dealing with a variety of situations.

Book Cooperation and Collective Action

Download or read book Cooperation and Collective Action written by David M. Carballo and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2012-12-15 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[Cooperation research] is one of the busiest and most exciting areas of transdisciplinary science right now, linking evolution, ecology and social science. . . this is the first major work or collection to address linkages between archaeology and cooperation research."—Michael E. Smith, Arizona State University Past archaeological literature on cooperation theory has emphasized competition's role in cultural evolution. As a result, bottom-up possibilities for group cooperation have been under theorized in favor of models stressing top-down leadership, while evidence from a range of disciplines has demonstrated humans to effectively sustain cooperative undertakings through a number of social norms and institutions. Cooperation and Collective Action is the first volume to focus on the use of archaeological evidence to understand cooperation and collective action. Disentangling the motivations and institutions that foster group cooperation among competitive individuals remains one of the few great conundrums within evolutionary theory. The breadth and material focus of archaeology provide a much needed complement to existing research on cooperation and collective action, which thus far has relied largely on game-theoretic modeling, surveys of college students from affluent countries, brief ethnographic experiments, and limited historic cases. In Cooperation and Collective Action, diverse case studies address the evolution of the emergence of norms, institutions, and symbols of complex societies through the last 10,000 years. This book is an important contribution to the literature on cooperation in human societies that will appeal to archaeologists and other scholars interested in cooperation research.