You Gotta Pay to Play

You gotta believe

I argue that proper assertion requires belief. Jennifer Lackey has recently argued otherwise. Here I respond to Lackey’s argument and provide positive evidence that permissible assertion does require belief. The positive evidence takes the form of an explanatory argument from linguistic patterns surrounding the give and take of assertion. Looming large in the background of the discussion is whe...

You gotta know when to hold 'em...

Putting together a winning team is certainly not a game. It requires skill, diligence, and a little bit of luck. The poker analogy is simply a tool to present critical information in a fun, relevant format. However, with a proactive, pragmatic, and creative approach to hiring, you will improve your odds of successfully hiring the perfect match for your practice. Good luck!

What You Gotta Know to Play Good in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma

For the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma there exist good strategies which solve the problem when we restrict attention to the long term average payoff. When used by both players, these assure the cooperative payoff for each of them. Neither player can benefit by moving unilaterally to any other strategy, i.e., these provide Nash equilibria. In addition, if a player uses instead an alternative which...

Iron chelation therapy: you gotta have heart.

Pay or Play

We introduce the class of pay or play games, which captures scenarios in which each decision maker is faced with a choice between two actions: one with a fixed payoff and another with a payoff dependent on others’ selected actions. This is, arguably, the simplest setting that models selection among certain and uncertain outcomes in a multi-agent system. We study the properties of equilibria in ...