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483
Evolutionary game dynamics
- Bulletin (New Seires) of the American Mathematical Society
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Cultural group selection, coevolutionary processes and large-scale cooperation
- Journal of Economic Behaviour & Organisation 53/1, Special
, 2004
"... In constructing improved models of human behavior, both experimental and behavioral economists have increasingly turned to evolutionary theory for insights into human psychology and preferences. Unfortunately, the existing genetic evolutionary approaches can explain neither the degree of prosocialit ..."
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Cited by 187 (12 self)
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In constructing improved models of human behavior, both experimental and behavioral economists have increasingly turned to evolutionary theory for insights into human psychology and preferences. Unfortunately, the existing genetic evolutionary approaches can explain neither the degree of prosociality (altruism and altruistic punishment) observed in humans, nor the patterns of variation in these behaviors across different behavioral domains and social groups. Ongoing misunderstandings about why certain models work, what they predict, and what the place is of “group selection ” in evolutionary theory have hampered the use of insights from biology and anthropology. This paper clarifies some of these issues and proposes an approach to the evolution of prosociality rooted in the interaction between cultural and genetic transmission. I explain how, in contrast to non-cultural species, the details of our evolved cultural learning capacities (e.g., imitative abilities) create the conditions for the cultural evolution of prosociality. By producing multiple behavioral equilibria, including group-beneficial equilibria, cultural evolution endogenously generates a mechanism of equilibrium selection that can favor prosociality. Finally, in the novel social environments left in the wake of these cultural evolutionary processes, natural selection is likely to favor prosocial genes
Social preferences, beliefs, and the dynamics of free riding in public good experiments
, 2009
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Conducting behavioral research on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Behav Res Methods 2012;44(1):1–23
"... Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is an online labor market where requesters post jobs and workers choose which jobs to do for pay. The central purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how to use this website for conducting behavioral research and lower the barrier to entry for re-searchers who could benefit ..."
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Cited by 123 (5 self)
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Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is an online labor market where requesters post jobs and workers choose which jobs to do for pay. The central purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how to use this website for conducting behavioral research and lower the barrier to entry for re-searchers who could benefit from this platform. We describe general techniques that apply to a variety of types of research and experiments across disciplines. We begin by discussing some of the advantages of doing experiments on Mechanical Turk, such as easy access to a large, stable, and diverse subject pool, the low cost of doing experiments and faster iteration between developing theory and executing experiments. We will discuss how the behavior of workers compares to experts and to laboratory subjects. Then, we illustrate the mechanics of putting a task on Mechanical Turk including recruiting subjects, executing the task, and reviewing the work that was submitted. We also provide solutions to common problems that a researcher might face when executing their research on this platform including techniques for conducting synchronous experiments, methods to ensure high quality work, how to keep data private, and how to maintain code security.
Cooperation Under the Shadow of the Future: Experimental Evidence from Infinitely Repeated Games
- AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW
, 2005
"... While there is an extensive literature on the theory of infinitely repeated games, empirical evidence on how “the shadow of the future” affects behavior is scarce and inconclusive. I simulate infinitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma games in the lab with a random continuation rule. The experimental de ..."
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Cited by 107 (3 self)
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While there is an extensive literature on the theory of infinitely repeated games, empirical evidence on how “the shadow of the future” affects behavior is scarce and inconclusive. I simulate infinitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma games in the lab with a random continuation rule. The experimental design represents an improvement over the existing literature by including sessions with finite repeated games as controls and a large number of players per session (which allows for learning without contagion effects). I find that the shadow of the future matters not only by significantly reducing opportunistic behavior, but also because its impact closely follows theoretical predictions.
The Online Laboratory: Conducting Experiments in a Real Labor Market. SSRN eLibrary
, 2010
"... Online labor markets have great potential as platforms for conducting experiments. They provide immediate access to a large and diverse subject pool, and allow researchers to control the experimental context. Online experiments, we show, can be just as valid—both internally and externally—as laborat ..."
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Cited by 102 (4 self)
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Online labor markets have great potential as platforms for conducting experiments. They provide immediate access to a large and diverse subject pool, and allow researchers to control the experimental context. Online experiments, we show, can be just as valid—both internally and externally—as laboratory and field experiments, while often requiring far less money and time to design and conduct. To demonstrate their value, we use an online labor market to replicate three classic experiments. The first finds quantitative agreement between levels of cooperation in a prisoner’s dilemma played online and in the physical laboratory. The second shows – consistent with behavior in the traditional laboratory – that online subjects respond to priming by altering their choices. The third demonstrates that when an identical decision is framed differently, individuals reverse their choice, thus replicating a famed Tversky-Kahneman result. Then we conduct a field experiment showing that workers have upwardsloping labor supply curves. Finally, we analyze the challenges to online experiments, proposing methods to cope with the unique threats to validity in an online setting, and examining the conceptual issues surrounding the external validity of online results. We conclude by presenting our views on the potential role that online experiments can play within the social sciences, and then recommend software development priorities and best practices. ∗Thanks to Alex Breinin and Xiaoqi Zhu for excellent research assistance. Thanks to
Secure or insure? A game-theoretic analysis of information security games
- IN: PROC. OF THE 17TH INTERNATIONAL WORLD WIDE WEB CONFERENCE (WWW2008), BEJING
, 2008
"... Despite general awareness of the importance of keeping one’s system secure, and widespread availability of consumer security technologies, actual investment in security remains highly variable across the Internet population, allowing attacks such as distributed denialof-service (DDoS) and spam distr ..."
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Cited by 98 (27 self)
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Despite general awareness of the importance of keeping one’s system secure, and widespread availability of consumer security technologies, actual investment in security remains highly variable across the Internet population, allowing attacks such as distributed denialof-service (DDoS) and spam distribution to continue unabated. By modeling security investment decision-making in established (e.g., weakest-link, best-shot) and novel games (e.g., weakest-target), and allowing expenditures in self-protection versus self-insurance technologies, we can examine how incentives may shift between investment in a public good (protection) and a private good (insurance), subject to factors such as network size, type of attack, loss probability, loss magnitude, and cost of technology. We can also characterize Nash equilibria and social optima for different classes of attacks and defenses. In the weakest-target game, an interesting result is that, for almost all parameter settings, more effort is exerted at Nash equilibrium than at the social optimum. We may attribute this to the “strategic uncertainty” of players seeking to self-protect at just slightly above the lowest protection level.
Do Social Preferences Increase Productivity? Field Experimental Evidence from Fishermen in Toyama Bay. Economic Inquiry. forthcoming
, 2010
"... In addition to showing that student measures of social preference, a concern for outcomes achieved by other reference agents, are quite different from those obtained in the field with participants who face social dilemmas in their daily lives, we find links between the social preferences of our fiel ..."
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Cited by 81 (10 self)
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In addition to showing that student measures of social preference, a concern for outcomes achieved by other reference agents, are quite different from those obtained in the field with participants who face social dilemmas in their daily lives, we find links between the social preferences of our field participants and their productivity at work. We also find that the field stock of social preferences evolves endogenously with respect to how widely team production is utilized. Because the link between productivity and social preference is strong, we provide a reason for the wider economics profession to take notice of social preferences. (JEL C93, D21, D24, H41, J24, M52, Z13) I.
Reciprocity, culture, and human cooperation: Previous insights and a new cross-cultural experiment
- PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B – BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
, 2009
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Trust, voluntary cooperation, and socio-economic background: survey and experimental evidence
, 2004
"... We report survey and experimental evidence on trust and voluntary cooperation from more than 630 non-student and student participants in rural and urban Russia. Our subjects have a diverse socioeconomic background that we relate to the answers of a survey on trust attitudes and to contribution behav ..."
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Cited by 74 (9 self)
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We report survey and experimental evidence on trust and voluntary cooperation from more than 630 non-student and student participants in rural and urban Russia. Our subjects have a diverse socioeconomic background that we relate to the answers of a survey on trust attitudes and to contribution behavior in a one-shot public goods game. We find that the socio-economic background affects trust attitudes, but we find no separate influence of socio-economic variables on cooperative behavior in a one-shot public goods experiment. However, cooperation is significantly positively correlated to trust toward strangers and beliefs about the fairness and helpfulness of others.
