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An active participation of players in evolutionary games depends on several factors, ranging from personal stakes to the properties of the interaction network. Diverse activity patterns thus have to be taken into account when studying the…
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled their use in complex agentic roles, involving decision-making with humans or other agents, making ethical alignment a key AI safety concern. While prior work has examined both…
Only 21% of employees consider themselves engaged at work. Moreover, disengagement has been shown to be even more problematic when work is repetitive in nature. Lack of engagement has been linked to variety of negative outcomes for…
We present the first general bounds on the mixing time of the Markov chain associated to the logit dynamics for wide classes of strategic games. The logit dynamics with inverse noise beta describes the behavior of a complex system whose…
The emergence and prevalence of cooperative behavior within a group of selfish individuals remains a puzzle for \text{evolutionary game theory} precisely because it conflicts directly with the central idea of natural selection. Accordingly,…
Recently, the market size of online game has been increasing astonishingly fast, and so does the importance of good game design. In online games, usually a human user competes with others, so the fairness of the game system to all users is…
The popularity of computer games is remarkably high and is still growing every year. Despite this popularity and the economical importance of gaming, research in game design, or to be more precise, of game mechanics that can be used to…
Social games like the prisoner's dilemma are often used to develop models of the role of emotion in social decision-making. Here we examine an understudied aspect of emotion in such games: how an individual's feelings are shaped by their…
Engaging in playful activities, such as playing a musical instrument, learning a language, or performing sports, is a fundamental aspect of human life. We present a quantitative empirical analysis of the engagement dynamics into playful…
A simple model for cooperation between "selfish" agents, which play an extended version of the Prisoner's Dilemma(PD) game, in which they use arbitrary payoffs, is presented and studied. A continuous variable, representing the probability…
Evolutionary game theory classically investigates which behavioral patterns are evolutionarily successful in a single game. More recently, a number of contributions have studied the evolution of preferences instead: which subjective…
With the prospect of autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agents, studying their tendency for cooperative behavior becomes an increasingly relevant topic. This study is inspired by the super-additive cooperation theory, where the…
Game theory formalizes certain interactions between physical particles or between living beings in biology, sociology, and economics, and quantifies the outcomes by payoffs. The prisoner's dilemma (PD) describes situations in which it is…
Most online platforms strive to learn from interactions with users, and many engage in exploration: making potentially suboptimal choices for the sake of acquiring new information. We study the interplay between exploration and competition:…
Gamification is an emerging design principle for information systems where game design elements are applied to non-game contexts. IS researchers have suggested that the IS discipline must study this area but there are other applications…
Maldaimonia is a new experiential concept that refers to self-actualization and self-expression through egocentric, destructive, and/or exploitative activities. Still, it is unclear whether maldaimonia is an actual facet of real experience.…
Synthesizing from Corbett and Munneke (2025), who demonstrated that questions originating in human-computer interaction (HCI) and game design can be answered through the theoretical toolkit of cognitive science, this perspective argues that…
We propose the study of mathematical ludology, which aims to formally interrogate questions of interest to game studies and game design in particular. The goal is to extend our mathematical understanding of complex games beyond…
Cooperation in one-shot anonymous interactions is a widely documented aspect of human behaviour. Here we shed light on the motivations behind this behaviour by experimentally exploring cooperation in a one-shot continuous-strategy…
Ecologists and economists try to explain collective behavior in terms of competitive systems of selfish individuals with the ability to learn from the past. Statistical physicists have been investigating models which might contribute to the…