Posts tagged Evolving Social Behaviors
Spamming the Regulator: Exploring a New Lobbying Strategy in EU Competition Procedures (pdf)

Marlene Jugl, William A.M. Pagel, Maria Camila Garcia Jimenez, Jean Pierre Salendres, William Lowe, Joanna J. Bryson, and Helena Malikova, Journal of Antitrust Enforcement, April 2023.

We document and examine a novel lobbying strategy in the context of competition regulation, a strategy that exploits the regulator’s finite administrative capacities. Companies with merger cases under scrutiny by the European Commission’s Directorate General for Competition appear to be employing a strategy of ‘spamming the regulator,’ through the strategic and cumulative submission of economic expert assessments. Procedural pressures may result in an undeservedly favorable assessment of the merger. Based on quantitative and qualitative analyses of an original dataset of all complex merger cases in the EU 2005–2020, we present evidence of this new strategy and a possible learning process among private actors. We suggest remedies to ensure regulatory effectiveness in the face of this novel strategy.

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2023ScienceSitesEthics and Policy, Evolving Social Behaviors, Regulation and Digital Governance
Expectations of Fairness and Trust Co-Evolve in Environments of Partial Information

Paul Rauwolf & and Joanna J. Bryson, Dynamic Games and Applications, 8(4):891-917, 2018.

Highly relevant to information technology policy: The more you know, the less you need to trust, though if you know nothing or don’t have a choice of who you work with, people have no reason to be trustworthy. Trust comes with PARTIAL information, AND at least some freedom. Open access because Bath+Springer

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2018ScienceSitesEvolving Social Behaviors, Origins and Nature of Cognition, Cultural Variation in Cooperation
Flexible Latching: A Biologically-Inspired Mechanism for Improving the Management of Homeostatic Goals

Philipp Rohlfshagen and Joanna J. Bryson, Cognitive Computation, 2(3):230-241, 2010.

Discusses a simple add-on mechanism for dynamic plans to allow sensible ordering of high-level drives, and explains why this problem is different from detailed action selection. Lots of experiments, some maths and some discussion of the literature on cognitive control in natural and artificial intelligence. Associated software comes with the standard python/jython distribution of BOD.

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2010ScienceSitesSystems Engineering, Evolving Social Behaviors, Emotions and Affect
Agent-Based Models as Scientific Methodology: A Case Study Analysing Primate Social Behaviour

Joanna J Bryson, Ando Yasushi and Hagen Lehmann, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - B, Biology, 362(1485):1685-1698, 2007.

This paper talks about how ABM fits in as a part of scientific methodology, and in particular analyzes as a case study the macaque social structure simulation in Hemelrijk’s DomWorld. The DomWorld link includes the associated software. An earlier version of this paper with the predictions and not the full analysis appears under 2005 below (Lehmann et al). Green open access draft.

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2007ScienceSitesEvolving Social Behaviors, Origins and Nature of Cognition
Emotions as Durative Dynamic State for Action Selection (pdf)

Emmanuel A. R. Tanguy, Phil J. Willis and Joanna J. Bryson, in IJCAI 2007, presented in Hyderabad in January 2007.

The 6-page version of the AI part of Emmanuel’s PhD on the Dynamic Emotion Representation, which may more generally be useful for selection problems that fall between long-term potentiation (learning) and nerve-cell firing (acting). Associated software.

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2007ScienceSitesEvolving Social Behaviors, Emotions and Affect
Skill Acquisition Through Program-Level Imitation in a Real-Time Domain

Mark Wood and Joanna J. Bryson, IEEE Transactions on Systems Man and Cybernetics, 37(2):272-285, 2007.

This paper presents an imitation learning system called COIL (inspired by Deb Roy’s CELL) capable of learning tasks in a dynamic real-time environment (Unreal Tournament). If you don’t subscribe to IEEE, here is a draft from May 2006. An even older version is Bath Technical report CSBU-2005-16.

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2007ScienceSitesEvolving Social Behaviors, Origins and Nature of Cognition, Systems Engineering
Where Should Complexity Go? Cooperation in Complex Agents with Minimal Communication (pdf)

Joanna J. Bryson, in the proceedings of the First GSFC/JPL Workshop on Radical Agent Concepts (WRAC), 2003.

Discusses when to use communication between agents in a multi-agent system vs. when to use behavior arbitration between modules in a modular single agent. Shows code from the primate colony simulation I’m working on with Jessica Flack. Final version is © Springer-Verlag. Updated 3 July 2002.

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2003ScienceSitesOrigins and Nature of Cognition, Evolving Social Behaviors