Related papers: A Formal Sociologic Study of Free Will
The theory of natural selection has two forms. Deductive theory describes how populations change over time. One starts with an initial population and some rules for change. From those assumptions, one calculates the future state of the…
The locations problem in infinite ethics concerns the relative moral status of different categories of potential bearers of value, the primary examples of which are people and points in time. The challenge is to determine which category of…
The structure of a society depends, to some extent, on the incentives of the individuals they are composed of. We study a stylized model of this interplay, that suggests that the more individuals aim at climbing the social hierarchy, the…
A dynamic model of collective consumption and saving decisions made by a finite number of agents with constant but different discount rates is developed. Collective utility is a weighted sum of individual utilities with time-varying utility…
Recent developments in cosmology indicate that every history having a nonzero probability is realized in infinitely many distinct regions of spacetime. Thus, it appears that the universe contains infinitely many civilizations exactly like…
Individuals in groups must often choose between acting selfishly and cooperating for the common good. The choices they make are based on their beliefs on how they expect their actions to affect others. We show that for a broad set of…
Indirect reciprocity is a major mechanism in the maintenance of cooperation among unrelated individuals. Indirect reciprocity leads to conditional cooperation according to social norms that discriminate the good (those who deserve to be…
Behavioral experiments on the Ultimatum Game have shown that we human beings have remarkable preference in fair play, contradicting the predictions by the game theory. Most of the existing models seeking for explanations, however, strictly…
An individually costly act that benefits all group members is a public good. Natural selection favors individual contribution to public goods only when some benefit to the individual offsets the cost of contribution. Problems of sex ratio,…
Any community in which membership is optional may eventually break apart, or fork. For example, forks may occur in political parties, business partnerships, social groups, cryptocurrencies, and federated governing bodies. Forking is…
In this paper, we do three kinds of work. First, we recognize four notions of necessity and two notions of possibility related to time flow, namely strong/weak historical/temporal necessities, as well as historical/temporal possibilities,…
We present an abstract social aggregation theorem. Society, and each individual, has a preorder that may be interpreted as expressing values or beliefs. The preorders are allowed to violate both completeness and continuity, and the…
Purpose: We propose a model to present a possible mechanism for obtaining sizeable behavioural structures by simulating an agent based on the evolutionary public good game with available social learning. Methods: The model considered a…
The concept of progress has characterized human society from millennia. However, this concept is elusive and too often given for certain. The goal of this paper is to suggest a general definition of human progress that satisfies, whenever…
A sequential decision-making agent balances between exploring to gain new knowledge about an environment and exploiting current knowledge to maximize immediate reward. For environments studied in the traditional literature, optimal…
A stylized experiment, the public goods game, has taught us the peculiar reproducible fact that humans tend to contribute more to shared resources than expected from economically rational assumptions. There have been two competing…
Arguably the most influential force in human history is the formation of social coalitions and alliances (i.e., long-lasting coalitions) and their impact on individual power. In most great ape species, coalitions occur at individual and…
Why are we good? Why are we bad? Questions regarding the evolution of morality have spurred an astoundingly large interdisciplinary literature. Some significant subset of this body of work addresses questions regarding our moral psychology:…
In social settings, much of human behavior is governed by unspoken rules of conduct. For artificial systems to be fully integrated into social environments, adherence to such norms is a central prerequisite. We investigate whether…
In this paper, we consider the problem of fair division of indivisible goods when the allocation of goods impacts society. Specifically, we introduce a second valuation function for each agent, determining the social impact of allocating a…