Selfish Reasons

Selfish metabolism

2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 7: 7–13, 2008 E volutionary biology has traditionally made much of the concept of selfishness. Charles Darwin reduced adaptation (and to a less satisfying degree, speciation) to the heritable variation and competition among individuals. As understanding of the genetic control of heredity and morphogenesis has become more sophisticated, Richard Dawkins has...

Selfish Knapsack

We consider a selfish variant of the knapsack problem. In our version, the items are owned by agents, and each agent can misrepresent the set of items she owns—either by avoiding reporting some of them (understating), or by reporting additional ones that do not exist (overstating). Each agent’s objective is to maximize, within the items chosen for inclusion in the knapsack, the total valuation ...

The Selfish Brain Theory

The selfish germ

Curiosity about the sex life of a wasp led to a new way of thinking and a powerful demonstration that evolutionary science could be predictive. That same approach could help find ways to slow or prevent treatment failures in cancer and infectious diseases.

Selfish Task Allocation

Recently there has been a lot of interest in problems at the intersection of Game Theory, Economics, and Computer Science. For example, there are interesting developments concerning algorithms for equilibria and cost sharing, algorithmic mechanism design, and the efficiency of systems with selfish users [17]. In this note, I will focus on the last area and in particular on the price of anarchy ...