Zachary Ernst

Explaining the Social Contract

Brian Skyrms has argued that the evolution of the social contract may be explained using the tools of evolutionary game theory. I show in the first half of this paper that the evolutionary game-theoretic models are often highly sensitive to the specific processes that they are intended to simulate. This sensitivity represents an important robustness failure that complicates Skyrmss project. But I go on to make the positive proposal that we may none the less obtain robust results by simulating the population structures that existed among our evolutionary ancestors. It is by extending the evolutionary models in this way that we should pursue the project of explaining the evolution of the social contract.

Collective Action as Individual Choice

We argue that conceptual analyses of collective action should be informed by game-theoretic analyses of collective action. In particular, we argue that Ariel Rubenstein’s so-called ‘Electronic Mail Game’ provides a useful model of collective action, and of the formation of collective intentions.

Toward a procedure for data mining proofs

In this paper, we report results of an experiment to use the mutual information criterion to automatically select formulas to guide the search for proofs using McCunes Prover9 system. The formulas were selected from the TPTP library of problems for theorem-provers.

Robustness and Conceptual Analysis in Evolutionary Game Theory

A variety of robustness objections have been made against evolutionary game theory. One of these objections alleges that the games used in the underlying model are too arbitrary and oversimplified to generate a robust model of interesting prosocial behaviors. In this paper, I argue that the robustness objection can be met. However, in order to do so, we must attend to important conceptual issues regarding the nature of fairness, justice, and other moral concepts. Specifically, we must better understand the relationship between moral concepts and formal characterizations of games.