Effects of punishment in a mobile population playing the prisoner’s dilemma game

We deal with a system of prisoner’s dilemma players undergoing continuous motion in a two-dimensional plane. In contrast to previous work, we introduce altruistic punishment after the game. We find punishing only a few of the cooperator-defector interactions is enough to lead the system to a cooperative state in environments where otherwise defection would take over the population. This happens even with soft nonsocial punishment (where both cooperators and defectors punish other players, a behavior observed in many human populations). For high enough mobilities or temptations to defect, low rates of social punishment can no longer avoid the breakdown of cooperation

On the design of peer punishment experiments

We discuss how technologies of peer punishment might bias the results that are observed in experiments. A crucial parameter is the “fine-to-fee” ratio, which describes by how much the punished subjects income is reduced relatively to the fee the punishing subject has to pay to inflict punishment. We show that a punishment technology commonly used in experiments embeds a variable fine-to-fee ratio and show that it confounds the empirical findings about why, whom, and how much subjects punish.

Colombian international trade from a physical perspective: towards an ecologial "Prebisch Thesis"

Prebisch's approach to economic development was based on the notion that there is an international historical division of labour. Peripheral countries are specialized in exporting primary goods while centre countries export industrial goods. The Terms of trade for peripheral countries tend to deteriorate. This approach can be extendend to ecological issues. The international Centre-Periphery division does not only involve the monetary exchange of goods and capital, but also the physical exchange in which Southern countries provide materials and energy so that Northern countries can develop their socioconomic metabolism. This metabolism process is guaranteed through cheap prices for primary goods. This paper aims to apply and extend Prebisch's thought on unequal exchange, both monetary and ecological, in relation to colombian trade in the period 1970-2002, using material flow analysis.

On punishment and well-being

The existence of punishment opportunities has been shown to cause efficiency in public goods experiments to increase considerably. In this paper we ask whether punishment also has a downside in terms of process dissatisfaction. We conduct an experiment to study the conjecture that an environment with stronger punishment possibilities leads to higher material but lower subjective well-being. The more general motivation for our study stems from the notion that people??s subjective well-being may be affected by the institutional environment they find themselves in. Our findings show that harsher punishment possibilities lead to signficantly higher well-being, controlling for earnings and other relevant variables. People derive independent satisfaction from interacting under the protection of strong punishment possibilities. These results complement the evidence on the neural basis of altruistic punishment reported in de Quervain et al. (2004).

Assessment of current anglo-saxon proposals about criminal justice and the justification of legal punishment: Moore, Duff and Finnis on retribution, and the challenging compatibility with the up-and-coming Restorative Justice

Pendent

Inter-group conflict and intra-group punishment in an experimental contest game

We study how conflict in a contest game is influenced by rival parties being groups and by group members being able to punish each other. Our main motivation stems from the analysis of socio-political conflict. The relevant theoretical prediction in our setting is that conflict expenditures are independent of group size and independent of whether punishment is available or not. We find, first, that our results contradict the independence of group-size prediction: conflict expenditures of groups are substantially larger than those of individuals, and both are substantially above equilibrium. Towards the end of the experiment material losses in groups are 257% of the predicted level. There is, however, substantial heterogeneity in the investment behaviour of individual group members. Second, allowing group members to punish each other after individual contributions to the contest effort are revealed leads to even larger conflict expenditures. Now material losses are 869% of the equilibrium level and there is much less heterogeneity in individual group members' investments. These results contrast strongly with those from public goods experiments where punishment enhances efficiency and leads to higher material payoffs.

Availability analysis of GMPLS connections based on physical network topology

This paper presents a study of connection availability in GMPLS over optical transport networks (OTN) taking into account different network topologies. Two basic path protection schemes are considered and compared with the no protection case. The selected topologies are heterogeneous in geographic coverage, network diameter, link lengths, and average node degree. Connection availability is also computed considering the reliability data of physical components and a well-known network availability model. Results show several correspondences between suitable path protection algorithms and several network topology characteristics

Studies about the atomic capabilities concept for linear control systems in physical multi-agent environments

This paper shows the impact of the atomic capabilities concept to include control-oriented knowledge of linear control systems in the decisions making structure of physical agents. These agents operate in a real environment managing physical objects (e.g. their physical bodies) in coordinated tasks. This approach is presented using an introspective reasoning approach and control theory based on the specific tasks of passing a ball and executing the offside manoeuvre between physical agents in the robotic soccer testbed. Experimental results and conclusions are presented, emphasising the advantages of our approach that improve the multi-agent performance in cooperative systems

One- and two-center physical space partitioning of the energy in the density functional theory

A conceptually new approach is introduced for the decomposition of the molecular energy calculated at the density functional theory level of theory into sum of one- and two-atomic energy components, and is realized in the "fuzzy atoms" framework. (Fuzzy atoms mean that the three-dimensional physical space is divided into atomic regions having no sharp boundaries but exhibiting a continuous transition from one to another.) The new scheme uses the new concept of "bond order density" to calculate the diatomic exchange energy components and gives them unexpectedly close to the values calculated by the exact (Hartree-Fock) exchange for the same Kohn-Sham orbitals

Coupling digital and physical worlds in an AR magic show performance: lessons learned

“Magic for a Pixeloscope” is a one hour show conceived to berepresented in a theater scenario that merges mixed and augmented reality (MR/AR) and full-body interaction with classical magic to create new tricks. The show was conceived by an interdisciplinary team composed by a magician, twointeraction designers, a theater director and a stage designer. Themagician uses custom based hardware and software to createnew illusions which are a starting point to explore new languagefor magical expression. In this paper we introduce a conceptualframework used to inform the design of different tricks; weexplore the design and production of some tricks included in theshow and we describe the feedback received on the world premiere and some of the conclusions obtained.

The evolution of personally disadvantageous punishment among cofoundresses of the ant Acromyrmex versicolor

Cofoundresses of the desert fungus garden ant Acromyrmex versicolorexhibit a forager specialist who subsumes all foraging risk priorto first worker eclosion (Rissing et al. 1989). In an experimentdesigned to mimic a "cheater" who refuses foraging assignment whenher lot, cofoundresses delayed/failed to replace their forager,often leading to demise of their garden (Rissing et al. 1996). Thecheater on task assignment is harmed, but so too is the punisher,as all will die without a healthy garden. In this paper we studythrough simulation the cofoundress interaction with haploid, asexualgenotypes which either replace a cheater or not (punishment), underboth foundress viscosity (likely for A. versicolor) and randomassortment. We find replacement superior to punishment only whenthere is no foraging risk and cheating is not costly to groupsurvival. Generally, punishment is evolutionarily superior,especially as forager risk increases, under both forms of dispersal.

Crime and punishment: Further results

I consider a general specification of criminals' objective functionand argue that, when the general non-expected utility theory issubstituted for the traditional expected utility theory, thehigh-fine-low-probability result (Becker, 1968) only holds underspecific and strong restrictions.

Learning and adaptation in physical heterogeneous teams of robots

In this paper we present a novel approach to assigning roles to robots in a team of physical heterogeneous robots. Its members compete for these roles and get rewards for them. The rewards are used to determine each agent’s preferences and which agents are better adapted to the environment. These aspects are included in the decision making process. Agent interactions are modelled using the concept of an ecosystem in which each robot is a species, resulting in emergent behaviour of the whole set of agents. One of the most important features of this approach is its high adaptability. Unlike some other learning techniques, this approach does not need to start a whole exploitation process when the environment changes. All this is exemplified by means of experiments run on a simulator. In addition, the algorithm developed was applied as applied to several teams of robots in order to analyse the impact of heterogeneity in these systems

A type stars - physical parameters from UVBY and H-beta photometry

uvby H-beta photometry has been obtained for a sample of 93 selected main sequence A stars. The purpose was to determine accurate effective temperatures, surface gravities, and absolute magnitudes for an individual determination of ages and parallaxes, which have to be included in a more extensive work analyzing the kinematic properties of A V stars. Several calibrations and methods to determine the above mentioned parameters have been reviewed, allowing the design of a new algorithm for their determination. The results obtained using this procedure were tested in a previous paper using uvby H-beta data from the Hauck and Mermilliod catalogue, and comparing the rusulting temperatures, surface gravities and absolute magnitudes with empirical determinations of these parameters.