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The problem of traffic congestion incurs numerous social and economical repercussions and has thus become a central issue in every major city in the world. For this work we look at the transportation domain from a multiagent system perspective, where every driver can be seen as an autonomous decision-making agent. We explore how learning approaches can help achieve an efficient outcome, even when agents interact in a competitive environment for sharing common resources. To this end, we consider the route choice problem, where self-interested drivers need to independently learn which routes minimise their expected travel costs. Such a selfish behaviour results in the so-called user equilibrium, which is inefficient from the system’s perspective. In order to mitigate the impact of selfishness, we present Toll-based Q-learning (TQ-learning, for short). TQ-learning employs the idea of marginal-cost tolling (MCT), where each driver is charged according to the cost it imposes on others. The use of MCT leads agents to behave in a socially desirable way such that the is attainable. In contrast to previous works, however, our tolling scheme is distributed (i.e., each agent can compute its own toll), is charged a posteriori (i.e., at the end of each trip), and is fairer (i.e., agents pay exactly their marginal costs). Additionally, we provide a general formulation of the toll values for univariate, homogeneous polynomial cost functions. We present a theoretical analysis of TQ-learning, proving that it converges to a system-efficient equilibrium (i.e., an equilibrium aligned to the system optimum) in the limit. Furthermore, we perform an extensive empirical evaluation on realistic road networks to support our theoretical findings, showing that TQ-learning indeed converges to the optimum, which translates into a reduction of the congestion levels by 9.1%, on average.

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. The Jolly Corner and Other Tales, 1903–1910 includes the final ten stories James wrote. Many involve satirical critiques of an increasingly narcissistic, acquisitive society - from 'The Papers', with its attack on celebrity culture, to 'The Birthplace', offering a sardonic view of the Shakespeare industry, and 'A Round of Visits', which conducts a horrified tour through selfishness and swindling in early twentieth-century New York. The title story itself was in James's own view 'a miraculous masterpiece in the line of the fantastic-gruesome, the supernatural-thrilling … the best thing of this sort I've ever done'. With its extensive textual history and wide-ranging notes, this volume will interest not only James scholars, but all students of early twentieth-century Anglo-American literature and culture.

How individuals tend to evaluate the combination of their own and other’s payoffs—social value orientations—is likely to be a potential target of future moral enhancers. However, the stability of cooperation in human societies has been buttressed by evolved mildly prosocial orientations. If they could be changed, would this destabilize the cooperative structure of society? We simulate a model of moral enhancement in which agents play games with each other and can enhance their orientations based on maximizing personal satisfaction. We find that given the assumption that very low payoffs lead agents to be removed from the population, there is a broadly stable prosocial attractor state. However, the balance between prosociality and individual payoff-maximization is affected by different factors. Agents maximizing their own satisfaction can produce emergent shifts in society that reduce everybody’s satisfaction. Moral enhancement considerations should take the issues of social emergence into account.

If you must be selfish, then be wise and not narrow-minded in your selfishness. Dalai Lama, 2002 NEGOTIATION is often characterized as interdependent actions involving a set of two or more decision-making units which have different preferences over the possible outcomes. By considering a negotiation process as a strategic interaction, we can shed light on interactive decision-making among actors who have a set of actions to choose from. In an interactive process, the actual or likely decisions by one agent have an impact on the other's choice of actions. Viewing this decision-making process within the structure of a game helps us explore different possibilities for solutions to conflicting preferences. In fact, game-theoretic analysis assists in uncovering order in seemingly chaotic interactions among negotiators. This chapter introduces a game-theoretic perspective in building a foundation for understanding structural conditions embedded in many conflict settings. It starts with theoretical assumptions about interactive decision-making and moves on to basic concepts involving the Prisoner's Dilemma and minimax. By introducing these and other concepts such as a dominant strategy and an equilibrium, the chapter lays the groundwork for further discussion about the dynamics of cooperation and conflict that will come later. Strategic interaction in negotiation In strategic situations where the outcome for each participant relies on mutual decisions, an individual's success depends on the choices of others. For instance, when one country concedes part of a disputed territory, they would want to have measures taken to ensure the territory is prevented from being used to attack. Not only one's own choices but also those of other actors drive the allocation of values. In other words, an ability to realize one's own desires hinges on what the other does (Schelling 1960). Thus the outcome derives from mutual influence of each other's actions and strategies, reflecting the decisions of all the concerned parties who have different interests. In general, negotiation has long been defined such that “choices of the actors will determine the allocation of some values,” and “the outcome for each participant is a function of the behavior of the other” (O. Young 1975, 5). More specifically, bargaining takes place because each actor's welfare is affected by the other's decisions.

Proponents of strong reciprocity (henceforth SR) often emphasize that whereas much seemingly altruistic behavior is ultimately selfish on standard evolutionary explanations of altruism, SR is genuinely altruistic. Proponents of SR furthermore hold that it is adaptive behavior. They argue that SR could not possibly have evolved via standard individualist pathways, such as compensating future fitness benefits, as in reciprocal altruism (RA), or fitness benefits accruing to relatives (kin selection), and that it therefore must have evolved via some other pathway, such as group selection. Some opponents of SR agree that SR is genuinely altruistic, but argue that it is maladaptive behavior (Burnham and Johnson 2005). Other opponents of SR agree that it might be adaptive behavior, but argue that if it is adaptive behavior it is not genuinely altruistic (West et al. 2007). A substantive part of this chapter is devoted to a critical scrutiny of this debate. I argue that it is absolutely essential to keep the notions of evolutionary and psychological altruism apart. Although both camps in the debate acknowledge this explicitly, I point out that the notions are sometimes conflated. Once we clearly distinguish between evolutionary and psychological altruism, the issue of whether SR is ultimately genuinely altruistic can be unpacked into two separate issues that in principle can be resolved clearly and independently of each other. I argue that the difference between SR and RA is much less clear-cut than SR’s opponents suggest. It is not clear that SR is evolutionarily and psychologically altruistic. This inconclusiveness need not undermine the case for SR, however. I argue that it is unwise for proponents of SR to try to differentiate it from standard explanations of human cooperation in terms of altruism and selfishness. It raises unnecessary suspicion and irritation in onlookers who are in principle sympathetic to the idea that SR covers a significant part of human cooperation. And it diverts attention from more important issues. At the end of the chapter I identify a few issues that I think are more important for SR’s cause than the issue of whether or not it is ultimately selfish.

We are not ready to suspect any person of being defective in selfishness. Adam Smith The combined assumptions of maximizing behavior, market equilibrium, and stable preferences, used relentlessly and unflinchingly, form the heart of the economic approach. Gary S. Becker Our purpose in this chapter is to lay out in clear (if not stark) terms exactly how economists think about people's decision making and behavior. We fully recognize that the economic way of thinking is not the only way people think about business and life more generally (through methods used in the hard sciences, psychology, the arts, etc.). Most people operate on several different intellectual plains, probably often more or less simultaneously. At other times they shift from intellectual plain to intellectual plain and remain there for a time with concentrated focus on given disciplinary methods of thinking. Here, we ask you to shift to the microeconomic intellectual plain and to remain there for at least the remainder of the course. However, be forewarned, with enough work on the economics plain, we expect many students will come to recognize the benefits of remaining there, or shifting back to the economics plain more often than you might now expect. We have frequently told our students that “economics is as much a ‘discipline’ as it is a disease. Once you catch it, it can be terminal, pervading with ease much of your thinking.” At the same time, we understand many students will want to resist the economic way of thinking every step of the way – until they have come to see the full method of thinking and have experienced its varied applicability to so many dimensions of behavior. We focus on the core founding assumptions in microeconomics, for two reasons: • First, this is a course in economics – not psychology or literature. We need to use your time and textbook space at our disposal economically, which means we need to stay focused on one disciplinary approach. • Second, we might wish we could fully integrate thinking methods and findings of other disciplines, but that is a tough order, primarily because economists have encountered difficulty doing that without undermining analytical progress through loss of precision, if not confusion, on students’ parts.

THE PROBLEM The problem is a problem of long standing. In the Presidential Address to the December 2001 Eastern Division American Philosophical Association Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, for instance, Virginia Held raised doubts about research programs in ethics that insist on naturalism . Held targeted recent efforts in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology to ground ethics in natural facts about human beings, and argued against philosophical projects – like those of Daniel Dennett, Paul Churchland, and Allan Gibbard – that seek to give ethics psychobiological foundations. She cautioned fellow feminist thinkers against embracing naturalism, congenial as embracing nature might seem, especially to thinkers – Held names Annette Baier – eager to revalue the ‘natural’ moral practices of care, and to generally reclaim the denigrated natural sphere – home to bodies, emotions, and the mundane, messy, as well as ‘sinful’ facts of reproduction – to which women have often been consigned. Held's argument, roughly, was that nature, by its very nature, cannot be turned to for answers about what is morally good, what evil, what called for, what forbidden. We rebel, as we should, against systems of gender hierarchy, no matter how rooted in ‘nature.’ We reject, as we should, callous selfishness, again no matter how natural. The normative, Held argued, cannot come from the natural; we should not try to ground moral oughts, her thought goes, in what ‘by nature’ is.

Introduction The marked complexity of primate social behaviour is usually ascribed to the extraordinary intelligence of primates (Whiten and Byrne, 1986, 1997; Byrne and Whiten, 1988). Of the ‘social tools’ adopted by primates various forms of ‘bargaining’ or exchange relationship (such as the interchange of grooming for received support as supposed for chimpanzees) have drawn much attention in both cognitive and evolutionary studies. Exchange relationships are often assumed to account for the occurrence of sociopositive acts, because these acts, such as grooming, food-sharing and support in fights by primates, seem to lower the fitness of the actor and to enhance that of the receiver. The theories that are commonly applied to explain such acts are based on the assumption that the tendency to display non-selfish behaviour (so-called ‘altruism’) is genetically encoded. For each aspect, on the basis of cost-benefit arguments, separate adaptive explanations are given and separate acts are supposed to contribute independently to the fitness of an individual (so that the complete fitness of an individual equals the sum of the contributions of the separate traits). The three main theories are: (1) The kin selection theory (Hamilton, 1964). Altruism may be spreading evolutionarily if it is directed towards kin, because of the high probability that closely related individuals share the gene responsible for its realisation. 2) The theory of reciprocal altruism (Trivers, 1971). Altruism can be part of a cooperative relationship, if it is returned by the receiver to the actor. Although the altruist suffers a loss in the short term, by being ‘paid back’ later, he will benefit in the long run.

The previous chapters introduced some topics unfamiliar to ordinary philosophical discourse: for instance, God's authoritative call , God's intervening Spirit , and human transformation by noncoercive divine power . We need to fill out these topics in connection with both the proposed cognitive shift in knowledge of divine reality and the dire human predicament of destructive selfishness and impending death. This chapter undertakes that task. We shall see that the ways of a perfectly loving God are unsettling indeed, and call for the killing of certain wayward human attitudes and deeds, for the sake of needed human transformation by divine power. Firsthand knowledge of divine reality follows suit, as this chapter shows in its moving further from abstraction to specific features of knowing the reality of the perfectly loving Jewish and Christian God. Hence, we may talk of “dying to know” God's reality. SPIRIT Given the evidence and argument of the previous chapters, we may say that a perfectly loving God goes beyond revelation as the imparting of information and nonpersonal experience to revelation as purposively available divine self-revelation. This God, being perfectly loving, offers a distinctive kind of purposively available evidence widely overlooked in philosophical and theological discussions of divine reality. Given our root problem of selfishness, the evidence includes divine self-revelation in the intended imparting of God's Spirit to humans as the irreducibly personal power behind volitional transformation of humans toward God's moral character.

Contemporary legal scholars have become keenly interested in behavioral approaches to law that recognize that real people do not always behave in a rationally selfish fashion. For example, numerous recent papers examine how human choice can be distorted by endowment effects, anchoring effects, availability biases, and other cognitive deficiencies. There is a curious imbalance to the modern "behavioral law and economics" literature, however. In brief, critiques of the rational selfishness model tend to focus far more on the first modifier - the assumption of rationality - than on second - the assumption of self interest. This book chapter reverses the emphasis. It argues that the human tendency to act in an other-regarding fashion (that is, to sacrifice to help or harm others) is far more pervasive, powerful, and important than is generally recognized. In support of this claim, the chapter reviews the extensive empirical evidence that has been accumulated over the past four decades on human behavior in social dilemma games, ultimatum games and dictator games. In the right circumstances, experimental subjects routinely behave as if they care about costs and benefits to others. In the parlance of economics, subjects "reveal" other-regarding preferences. Moreover, the decision to act in an other-regarding fashion seems mostly driven not by personal payoffs but by social context - perceptions of what others believe, what others expect, and how others are likely to behave. These empirical findings are important not only to our understanding of individual behavior but also to our understanding of a wide variety of social institutions. To illustrate, the chapter considers how the phenomenon of other-regarding preferences may offer insight into the nature and workings of social norms. In particular, it considers how other-regarding preferences may shed light on a variety of questions that have long troubled the norms literature, including the questions of what sorts of behaviors are most likely to solidify into norms, why people follow norms, and how policymakers and "norm entrepreneurs" can best use norms to change behavior.