The Deceiving Game

The moral comparison of the three venues of deception—lying, falsely implicating, and nonverbal deception—is a central, ongoing debate in the ethics of deception. To date there has been no attempt to advance in the debate through experimental philosophy. Using methods of experimental economics, we devised a strategic game to test positions in the debate. Our article presents the experimental results and shows how philosophical analysis of the results allows drawing valid normative conclusions. Our conclusions testify against the dominant position in the debate—that lying is morally worse than all non-lying deceptions. They offer prima facie support to the view that the venue of deception makes no moral difference.

Can We Commit Future Managers to Honesty?

In a competitive business environment, dishonesty can pay. Self-interested executives and managers can have incentive to shade the truth for personal gain. In response, the business community has considered how to commit these executives and managers to a higher ethical standard. The MBA Oath and the Dutch Bankers Oath are examples of such a commitment device. The question we test herein is whether the oath can be used as an effective form of ethics management for future executives/managers—who for our experiment we recruited from a leading French business school—by actually improving their honesty. Using a classic Sender-Receiver strategic game experiment, we reinforce professional identity by pre-selecting the group to which Receivers belong. This allows us to determine whether taking the oath deters lying among future managers. Our results suggest “yes and no.” We observe that these future executives/managers who took a solemn honesty oath as a Sender were (a) significantly more likely to tell the truth when the lie was detrimental to the Receiver, but (b) were not more likely to tell the truth when the lie was mutually beneficial to both the Sender and Receiver. A joint product of our design is our ability to measure in-group bias in lying behavior in our population of subjects (comparing behavior of subjects in the same and different business schools). The experiment provides clear evidence of a lack of such bias.

Catalonia

This chapter focuses on Catalonia, an exemplar of the democratized movement. Using a substantial number of interviews, the chapter discusses the tactics that the Catalan secessionists have used, and highlights the possibilities and limitations of a fully institutionalized movement. It argues that the Catalan secessionist movement is truly a public debate and much more likely in advanced democracies. Up close it can appear quite different from the efforts in West Papua, Bougainville, and Northern Cyprus, and yet they are playing the same strategic game insofar as they all need to work through the home state and enlist the international community. By this context, the chapter investigates how the democratized movement utilized the political apparatus of the state to achieve its ends — rather than resort to violence — and appeal to norms of democratic legitimacy. Ultimately, the chapter discusses the Catalan secessionist leadership's attempt to get external governments to apply pressure on Madrid to negotiate.

Strategic Understandings: An Investigation of Professional Academy Youth Soccer Coaches’ Interpretation, Knowledge, and Application of Game Strategies

The purpose of this study was to explore professional soccer coaches’ interpretations of features suggesting players’ game understanding across the age phases of professional academy youth soccer in England, with particular attention paid to the role of strategic understanding. Semistructured interviews were conducted with coaches (n = 19) of players aged 9–23 years to better understand how coaches understand and apply methods to develop players’ strategic game understanding. Data revealed that coaches prioritized the technical and tactical development of their players over strategic development. However, across the age phases, coaches encountered challenges with coaching for strategic understanding (i.e., maintaining control of the game, players as problem solvers, player reflection, and coaching individuals within a team). The authors suggest that coaches and program designers need to show more intent toward developing players’ strategic understanding, becoming more purposeful when choosing “how” to develop this. In particular, coaches should consider how coaching methods that seek to develop players’ metacognitive game skills can be applied, with the goal of developing self-aware, flexible, and independent players as learners who demonstrate an appropriately “deep” understanding of the game.

Theory and Measurement of Common Ownership

The common ownership hypothesis, that the presence of diversified investors with holdings in competing firms distorts behavior away from own-firm profit maximization, has generated substantial controversy. Here, we focus on the problem of measuring common ownership. We reflect on three approaches, in order of the degree of modeling structure imposed. First, a purely descriptive summary of investor cross holdings; second, a theoretically motivated notion of “profit weights,” which captures the distortion without modeling the strategic interaction of firms; and finally, the fully structural approach, which consists of modeling both the distortions and the strategic game itself.

The one player guessing game: a diagnosis on the relationship between equilibrium play, beliefs, and best responses

Experiments involving games have two dimensions of difficulty for subjects in the laboratory. One is understanding the rules and structure of the game and the other is forming beliefs about the behavior of other players. Typically, these two dimensions cannot be disentangled as belief formation crucially depends on the understanding of the game. We present the one-player guessing game, a variation of the two-player guessing game (Grosskopf and Nagel 2008), which turns an otherwise strategic game into an individual decision-making task. The results show that a majority of subjects fail to understand the structure of the game. Moreover, subjects with a better understanding of the structure of the game form more accurate beliefs of other player’s choices, and also better-respond to these beliefs.

ACTIVACIÓN ESTRATÉGICA DEL DERECHO EN LA IMPLEMENTACIÓN DE POLÍTICAS MINERAS

Supongamos que tiene un derecho, pero ignora que lo tiene o conociéndolo sabe que su ejercicio le es inconveniente; probablemente, no lo activará. Supongamos que obtiene beneficios adicionales al cumplir literalmente la ley o al aplicarla en un sentido diferente para el que fue previsto; probablemente, buscarás este beneficio. Además, si puede eludir una inconveniente ley sin violarla para que su situación actual mejore; probablemente, la eludirá. Los actores, durante la implementación de una política pública, toman este tipo de decisiones una y otra vez. Despliegan sus recursos y la ley, unos contra otros, buscando objetivos específicos; esto se conoce como juego de actores o juego de rivales. Además, si los actores seleccionan sus decisiones, entre muchas alternativas, planifican su implementación y buscan deliberadamente la reacción del rival, nos encontramos ante un juego estratégico.En este artículo, desarrollamos y explicamos el juego de actores y la activación estratégica del derecho. Este trabajo se basa en el análisis de la política pública minera y se desarrolla sobre la implementación de cuatro proyectos mineros (Cañariaco, Tía María, Tintaya y Antapacay). Let us assume you have a right, but you ignore that you have it or you are aware of it and you realize that is inconvenient; you will certainly choose not to use it. Let us suppose that you gain benefits by fulfilling the law literally or by applying it in a different sense from what it was intended for: you will probably seek this advantage. Furthermore, if you can bypass an inconvenient law without breaking it so that your current situation improves; youwill probably bypass it.The actors during the implementation of a public policy take these types of decisions time and again. Usually, they deploy the law against each other seeking specifics goals; this is known as a game of actors. Furthermore, if the actors select their decisions among many alternatives, plan their implementation and seek the reaction of the rival, we facing a strategic game of actors.In this paper, we develop and explain the game of actors and the strategic activation of the law. This paper is based on the analysis of mining public policy and on the study of four cases of implementation of large mining projects; Cañariaco, Tia Maria, Tintaya and Antapacay.

A practical application of game theory to optimize selection of hardware Trojan detection strategies

A wide variety of Hardware Trojan countermeasures have been developed, but less work has been done to determine which are optimal for any given design. To address this, we consider not only metrics related to the performance of the countermeasure, but also the likely action of an adversary given their goals. Trojans are inserted by an adversary to accomplish an end, so these goals must be considered and quantified in order to predict these actions. The model presented here builds upon a security economic approach that models the adversary and defender motives and goals in the context of empirically derived countermeasure efficacy metrics. The approach supports formation of a two-player strategic game to determine optimal strategy selection for both adversary and defender. A game may be played in a variety of contexts, including consideration of the entire design lifecycle or only a step in product development. As a demonstration of the practicality of this approach, we present an experiment that derives efficacy metrics from a set of countermeasures (defender strategies) when tested against a taxonomy of Trojans (adversary strategies). We further present a software framework, GameRunner, that automates not only the solution to the game but also mathematical and graphical exploration of “what if” scenarios in the context of the game. GameRunner can also issue “prescriptions,” a set of commands that allows the defender to automate the application of the optimal defender strategy to their circuit of concern. Finally, we include a discussion of ongoing work to include additional software tools, a more advanced experimental framework, and the application of irrationality models to account for players who make subrational decisions.