More Game Theory
Quite a number of weekends ago, I was able to crash a conference on game theory, evolution, and social contract. While I didn't understand all of what was going on, it still was very interesting for me to see what sort of stuff is going on in the area. I thought I'd make a post with a run-down of what was covered. [It is worthwhile to note that these summaries are based on my sketchy notes and may not accurately reflect what was said, necessarily.]
The following are synopses of the first several talks. I meant to write up the others, but at this point, I would rather post what I have than take the time. The rest are the titles/topics covered without synopsis.
Ken Binmore - Natural Justice
This was one of the more interesting talks for me, since I could follow a lot of it. Generally, Binmore was concerned with equilibrium selection problems concerning cultural maintenance of social contract. Particularly, he was using game theory as a tool to analyze what might be considered "fair," using pure hunter-gatherer societies as examples. Within this framework, he focused on social indices, which he claimed helped select fair equilibria, but which were highly context dependent.
Jason Alexander - Local Interaction Models
Jason Alexander generally focused on local interaction models vs. replicator dynamics in modelling evolution. He tried to motivate that local interaction was better because it favored Nash equilibria less artificially. In general, he tries to see what notion of stability might be best for these games immitating social structure. Evolutionary stability, dynamic stability, and stochastic stability all turn out to be different. In doing this he focused on whether moving to local interaction models might give results that better approximate intuitive expectations for systems.
Peter Vanderschraaf - Justice as Mutual Advantage
Peter Vanderschraaf's talk was one of the ones most dense to me, primarily because I have no substantial background in ethics. What I got out of it, though, was that considering Justice to be just mutual advantage has some problems. The commonly cited necessary properties are not sufficient to capture a notion of Justice, but adding another property to make it sufficient causes new problems. Furthermore, in any case, the Contribution Requirement and vulnerability objection stand in the way as well. With the CR, the system seems too narrow, whereas without CR, it seems too broad.
