This article reviews the work of significant humanities and social science scholars for their thoughts and theories about advertising’s social and cultural consequences. In brief, they view advertising as intrusive and environmental and its effects as inescapable and profound. They see it as reinforcing materialism, cynicism, irrationality, selfishness, anxiety, social competitiveness, sexual p...

The equilibrium outcome of a strategic interaction between two or more players may depend on the weight they place on each other’s payoff. A positive, negative or zero weight represents altruism, spite or complete selfishness, respectively. Paradoxically, the real, material payoff in equilibrium for a group of altruists may be lower than for selfish or spiteful groups. However, this can only be...

Most of the past studies on peer-to-peer systems have emphasized routing and lookup. The selfishness of users, which brings on the free riding problem, has not attracted sufficient attention from researchers. In this paper, we introduce a decentralized reputation-based trust model first, in which trust relationships could be built based on the reputation of peers. Subsequently, we use the itera...

In this paper we propose a resilient scheme for multi-path routing using a biologically-inspired attractor selection method. The main advantage of this approach is that it is highly noise-tolerant and capable of operating in a very robust manner under changing environment conditions. We will apply an enhanced attractor selection model to multi-path routing in overlay networks and discuss some g...

We examine experimentally how a person's generosity depends on the sex of that person, on the sex of the person who is the target of the generous act, and on the degree of anonymity between the interacting parties. In our data fewer men than women give non-zero amounts; men receive less than women; and less is given when subjects receive money publicly on stage than when payments are private. T...

This paper presents an approach based on cooperative self-organization for artificial systems, in order to tackle openness and dynamics. In this work, cooperation is used as a local criterion enabling parts of the system –the cooperative agents– to reorganize as to autonomously modify their interactions and then the global function. The difficulty in defining cooperation and the means to reesta...

Inequity aversion models have dominated the behavioral economics landscape in the last decade. This study uses variants of dictator and trust games to provide empirical content to these models. We manipulate market features—such as competition over resources—to demonstrate that extant models cannot explain realistic manipulations of either game. For example, we show that if socially acceptable ...

Prosocial behavior is a central feature of human life and a major focus of research across the natural and social sciences. Most theoretical models of prosociality share a common assumption: Humans are instinctively selfish, and prosocial behavior requires exerting reflective control over these basic instincts. However, findings from several scientific disciplines have recently contradicted thi...