This is the beginning of a series discussing methodological approaches used in the social sciences. This article outlines the general problems and difficulties associated with a common method of statistical inference in psychology (my background) and other social science fields: null hypothesis significance testing (hereafter NHST). This introduction can serve as a starting point for researcher...

The design of social laws for artiicial agent societies is a basic approach to coordinating multi-agent systems. It exposes the spectrum between fully-centralized and fully-decentralized coordination mechanisms. Useful social laws set constraints on the agents' activities which allow them to work individually in a mutually compatible manner. The design of useful social laws is a problem of cons...

Neuroeconomics is a new, interdisciplinary field in which economics, psychology, computational science, and neuroscience converge to allow for examinations of the neural basis of reward-related decision making in social and nonsocial contexts. The aims of this paper are, first, to discuss recent advances in the use of neuroeconomic games to examine social decision making in children and adolesc...

A simple normative theory is proposed for the responsible management of risks to the public. A ‘lifesaving’ alternative, if it is truly to save lives, should return to the community more years of life expectancy in good health than the years of work consumed to pay for its cost. This common-sense time principle of risk management provides a criterion for acceptable risk that is applicable in co...

We devise a simple yet highly effective technique for solving general optimal control problems in Excel spreadsheets. The technique exploits Excel’s native nonlinear programming (NLP) Solver Command, in conjunction with two calculus worksheet functions, namely, an initial value problem solver and a discrete data integrator, in a direct solution paradigm adapted to the spreadsheet. The technique...