Jacques Ellul argued that modernity’s nearly exclusive reliance on science and technology to design society would threaten hunan freedom. Of particular concern for Ellul was the prospect of the technical milieu overwhelming culture. The commodification of the Volta River in order to modernize Ghana illustrates the Ellulian dilemma of the autonomy of technique. Displacing a commons way of life, ...

The present paper provides a limit characterization of the payoff set supported by belief-free equilibria in repeated games with private monitoring, as the discount factor approaches one and the noise on private information vanishes. Contrary to the conjecture by Ely, Hörner, and Olszewski (2005), in many of the three-or-more player games, the payoff set is given by a union of product sets, as ...

In many production firms it is common practice to financially reward managers for firm performance improvement. The use of financial incentives for improvement has been widely researched in several analytical and empirical studies. Literature has also addressed the strategic effect of incentives, in particular what the effect of certain incentive structures would be on the behavior of a firm's ...

This paper explores the evolution of strategies in a n-player dilemma game. These n-player dilemmas provide a formal representation of many real world social dilemmas. Those social dilemmas include littering, voting and sharing common resources such as sharing computer processing time. This paper explores the evolution of altruism using an nplayer dilemma. Our results show the importance of soc...

This paper studies N player infinitely repeated games with imperfect private monitoring where the discount factor is close to unity. Ely and Valimaki [4] (written as EV below) construct a strategy which makes players indifferent among their actions in each period and show the folk theorem in prisoner’s dilemma games with two players when monitoring is almost perfect. However, their analysis of ...

Cooperation lies at the foundations of human societies, yet why people cooperate remains a conundrum. The issue, known as network reciprocity, of whether population structure can foster cooperative behavior in social dilemmas has been addressed by many, but theoretical studies have yielded contradictory results so far—as the problem is very sensitive to how players adapt their strategy. However...

This paper analyzes a repeated game of prisoner’s dilemma, in which players meet all of their neighbors once, then imitate the neighbors or themselves whoever have the highest total payoffs, and finally make mistakes with small probability at each time period. All the limit states, including cooperation, no-cooperation, and coexistence of both in unperturbed dynamics are first derived. It is th...

We simulate the prisoner’s dilemma and hawk-dove games on a real social acquaintance network. Using a discrete analogue of replicator dynamics, we show that surprisingly high levels of cooperation can be achieved, contrary to what happens in unstructured mixing populations. Moreover, we empirically show that cooperation in this network is stable with respect to invasion by defectors.

Are more intelligent groups better at cooperating? A meta-study of repeated prisoner’s dilemma experiments run at numerous universities suggests that students cooperate 5% to 8% more often for every 100 point increase in the school’s average SAT score. This result survives a variety of robustness tests. Axelrod (1984) recommends that the way to create cooperation is to encourage players to be p...