scholarly journals Noncompliance With Safety Guidelines as a Free-Riding Strategy: An Evolutionary Game-Theoretic Approach to Cooperation During the COVID-19 Pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jose C. Yong ◽  
Bryan K. C. Choy
Keyword(s):  
Public Goods ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Evolutionary Game ◽  
Free Riding ◽  
Theoretic Approach ◽  
Psychological Mechanisms ◽  
Public Goods Games ◽  
The Social ◽  
Evolved Psychological Mechanisms ◽  
Game Theoretic

Evolutionary game theory and public goods games offer an important framework to understand cooperation during pandemics. From this perspective, the COVID-19 situation can be conceptualized as a dilemma where people who neglect safety precautions act as free riders, because they get to enjoy the benefits of decreased health risk from others’ compliance with policies despite not contributing to or even undermining public safety themselves. At the same time, humans appear to carry a suite of evolved psychological mechanisms aimed at curbing free riding in order to ensure the continued provision of public goods, which can be leveraged to develop more effective measures to promote compliance with regulations. We also highlight factors beyond free riding that reduce compliance rates, such as the emergence of conspiratorial thinking, which seriously undermine the effectiveness of measures to suppress free riding. Together, the current paper outlines the social dynamics that occur in public goods dilemmas involving the spread of infectious disease, highlights the utility and limits of evolutionary game-theoretic approaches for COVID-19 management, and suggests novel directions based on emerging challenges to cooperation.

EFFECTS OF ENVIRONMENT KNOWLEDGE ON AGGLOMERATION AND COOPERATION IN SPATIAL PUBLIC GOODS GAMES

2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (supp01) ◽  
pp. 1250056 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHENG-YI XIA ◽  
SANDRO MELONI ◽  
YAMIR MORENO
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Public Goods ◽  
Evolutionary Game Theory ◽  
Cooperative Behavior ◽  
Evolutionary Game ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Public Goods Games ◽  
Competitive Environments ◽  
The Social ◽  
Standing Problem

Nowadays, our society is characterized by high levels of social cohesion and cooperation that are in contrast with the selfish nature of human beings. One of the principal challenges for the social sciences is to explain the emergence of agglomeration and cooperative behavior in an environment characterized by egoistic individuals. In this paper we address this long standing problem with the tools given by evolutionary game theory. Specifically, we explore a model in which selfish individuals interact in a public goods creation environment. As a further ingredient each agent is characterized by an individual expectation and, if unsatisfied, can change its location. In this scenario we study the effects of the knowledge of other players' performances on both cooperation and agglomeration and discuss the results in the context of previous and related works. Our results show that cooperation and agglomeration are generally robust against the inclusion of different information on other player performances and, in some cases, it can produce an enhancement of the cooperative behavior. Moreover, our results demonstrate that only in extreme and very competitive environments cooperation and agglomeration are lost.

scholarly journals A game theoretic approach reveals that discretizing clinical information can reduce antibiotic misuse

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maya Diamant ◽  
Shoham Baruch ◽  
Eias Kassem ◽  
Khitam Muhsen ◽  
Dov Samet ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Antibiotic Prescription ◽  
Clinical Information ◽  
Social Optimum ◽  
Theoretic Approach ◽  
Theoretic Analysis ◽  
Game Theoretic Analysis ◽  
Optimal Output ◽  
The Social ◽  
Game Theoretic ◽  
Game Theoretic Approach

AbstractThe overuse of antibiotics is exacerbating the antibiotic resistance crisis. Since this problem is a classic common-goods dilemma, it naturally lends itself to a game-theoretic analysis. Hence, we designed a model wherein physicians weigh whether antibiotics should be prescribed, given that antibiotic usage depletes its future effectiveness. The physicians’ decisions rely on the probability of a bacterial infection before definitive laboratory results are available. We show that the physicians’ equilibrium decision rule of antibiotic prescription is not socially optimal. However, we prove that discretizing the information provided to physicians can mitigate the gap between their equilibrium decisions and the social optimum of antibiotic prescription. Despite this problem’s complexity, the effectiveness of the discretization solely depends on the type of information available to the physician to determine the nature of infection. This is demonstrated on theoretic distributions and a clinical dataset. Our results provide a game-theory based guide for optimal output of current and future decision support systems of antibiotic prescription.

scholarly journals Cheater-altruist synergy in immunopathogenic ecological public goods games

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryce Morsky ◽  
Dervis Can Vural
Keyword(s):  
Immune System ◽  
Public Goods ◽  
Free Riding ◽  
Average Growth ◽  
Public Goods Games ◽  
Cheating Behavior ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Population Dynamics Models ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Dynamics Models

AbstractMuch research has focused on the deleterious effects of free-riding in public goods games, and a variety of mechanisms that suppresses cheating behavior. Here we argue that under certain conditions cheating behavior can be beneficial to the population. In a public goods game, cheaters do not pay for the cost of the public goods, yet they receive the benefit. Although this free-riding harms the entire population in the long run, the success of cheaters may aid the population when there is a common enemy that antagonizes both cooperators and cheaters. Here we study models in which an immune system antagonizes a cooperating pathogen. We investigate three population dynamics models, and determine under what conditions the presence of cheaters help defeat the immune system. The mechanism of action is that a polymorphism of cheaters and altruists optimizes the average growth rate. Our results give support for a possible synergy between cooperators and cheaters in ecological public goods games.

The philosophical interpretation of language game theory

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Zangwill
Keyword(s):  
Game Theory ◽  
Evolutionary Game Theory ◽  
Evolutionary Game ◽  
Language Game ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Theoretic Approach ◽  
Philosophical Interpretation ◽  
Game Theoretic ◽  
Game Theoretic Approach

Abstract I give an informal presentation of the evolutionary game theoretic approach to the conventions that constitute linguistic meaning. The aim is to give a philosophical interpretation of the project, which accounts for the role of game theoretic mathematics in explaining linguistic phenomena. I articulate the main virtue of this sort of account, which is its psychological economy, and I point to the casual mechanisms that are the ground of the application of evolutionary game theory to linguistic phenomena. Lastly, I consider the objection that the account cannot explain predication, logic, and compositionality.

scholarly journals eGAP: An Evolutionary Game Theoretic Approach to Random Forest Pruning

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 37
Author(s):  
Khaled Fawagreh ◽  
Mohamed Medhat Gaber
Keyword(s):  
Random Forest ◽  
Replicator Dynamics ◽  
Evolutionary Game ◽  
Theoretic Approach ◽  
Healthcare Applications ◽  
Healthcare Data ◽  
Smart Healthcare ◽  
Game Theoretic ◽  
Game Theoretic Approach

To make healthcare available and easily accessible, the Internet of Things (IoT), which paved the way to the construction of smart cities, marked the birth of many smart applications in numerous areas, including healthcare. As a result, smart healthcare applications have been and are being developed to provide, using mobile and electronic technology, higher diagnosis quality of the diseases, better treatment of the patients, and improved quality of lives. Since smart healthcare applications that are mainly concerned with the prediction of healthcare data (like diseases for example) rely on predictive healthcare data analytics, it is imperative for such predictive healthcare data analytics to be as accurate as possible. In this paper, we will exploit supervised machine learning methods in classification and regression to improve the performance of the traditional Random Forest on healthcare datasets, both in terms of accuracy and classification/regression speed, in order to produce an effective and efficient smart healthcare application, which we have termed eGAP. eGAP uses the evolutionary game theoretic approach replicator dynamics to evolve a Random Forest ensemble. Trees of high resemblance in an initial Random Forest are clustered, and then clusters grow and shrink by adding and removing trees using replicator dynamics, according to the predictive accuracy of each subforest represented by a cluster of trees. All clusters have an initial number of trees that is equal to the number of trees in the smallest cluster. Cluster growth is performed using trees that are not initially sampled. The speed and accuracy of the proposed method have been demonstrated by an experimental study on 10 classification and 10 regression medical datasets.

Public Finance without Taxation: Free–Riding as Institutional Artifact

2012 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 191-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard E. Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Public Finance ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Public Goods ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
Free Riding ◽  
Center Stage ◽  
Personal Interaction ◽  
The Social ◽  
Living Together

Abstract Expositions of the theory of public finance mostly assume that taxation is necessary to finance public goods because free riding prevents their provision through market arrangements. Free riding, however, is an artifact of the assumption that state is the only social option to market. Once it is recognized that civil society contains a rich array of institutions and practices that channel personal interaction, free riding recedes in significance and perhaps even disappears. Free riding is a product of a particular model of public goods and is not a universal quality of societal living together. In this respect, there is a deep similarity between cities and such entities as hotels and malls which supply public goods without taxation. This paper places the social organization of shared consumption on center stage in the theory of public finance, thereby relegating taxation to side show status.

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