Social Motives and Expectations in One-Shot Asymmetric Prisoner's Dilemmas

We propose a formal-behavioral framework with 3 components: nonselfish motives, expectations about others' nonselfish motives, and a game-theoretic component. For nonselfish motives, 3 nonstandard utility models representing altruism, inequality aversion, and norms are considered. Expectations are modeled as certain versus uncertain expectations. The game-theoretic component predicts behavior of actors and actors' expectations about behaviors of others. This framework is applied to asymmetric one-shot prisoner's dilemmas; predictions are tested experimentally. Formal analyses show that asymmetry provides new predictions through which nonstandard utility-expectation models can be distinguished. Empirical tests show that the inequality aversion model does considerably worse than altruistic and normative variants. Statistical tests for own motives, expected motives, and the association between the two are provided, while accounting for decision noise.     

Phase separation in mixtures of colloidal platelets and non-adsorbing polymer: a scaled particle treatment

Scaled particle theory is used to calculate the equation of state for and the free volume accessible to a non-adsorbing polymer, represented by spheres, in a system of colloidal platelets, represented by cut spheres. At low densities the predictions agree very well with computer simulations. For infinitely thin discs, the predictions agree with existing simulation data for the isotropic phase. The analytical results are used to predict the isotropic-isotropic phase boundary as a function of platelet aspect ratio and polymer/colloid size ratio.     

Behavior in Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma Games with Shifted Outcomes Analyzed with a Statistical Learning Model

A fuzzy set theoretical framework is proposed for the analysis of sociometric structure characterized by vagueness of liking between individuals and a person's relative degree of belonging to a social group. Max‐min transitivity of a fuzzy relation is employed as a basic concept to examine the degree of liking and clustering in group structures. A distance model based on min‐max transitivity is also formulated as a special case of transitivity analysis. Other notions of transitivity such as the max‐product and the max‐* are also discussed. An empirical analysis is performed to examine the applicability of the proposed transitivity concepts. It appears that the current methodological construct provides a more appropriate perspective in the analysis of the group structure properties.     

The Cricket and the Ant: Organizational Trade-offs in Changing Environments

Organizations face trade-offs when they adopt strategies in changing resource environments. The type of trade-off depends on the type of resource change. This paper offers an organizational trade-off model for quantitative resource changes. We call it the “Cricket and Ant” (CA) model, because the pertaining strategies resemble the cricket and ant's behavior in La Fontaine's famous fable. We derive theorems in this CA model in First Order Logic, which we also use to demonstrate that two theory fragments of organizational ecology, i.e., niche width theory and propagation strategy theory, obtain as variant cases of CA; their predictions on environmental selection preferences derive as theorems once their respective boundary conditions are represented in the formal machinery.