The Statistical Mechanics of Best-Response Strategy Revision

This paper compares local and global strategic interaction when players update using the (myopic) best-response rule. I show that randomizing the order in which players update their strategic choice suffices to achieve coordination on the risk-dominant strategy in symmetric 2 × 2 coordination games. The "persistant randomness" which is necessary to achieve similar coordination with global interaction is replaced under local interaction by spatial variation in the initial condition. An extension of the risk-dominance idea gives the same convergence result for K × K games with strategic complementarities. Similar results for K × K pure coordination games and potential games are also presented. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Number: C78.     

Effects of compound messages on global characteristics of Galileo spaces

The present article investigates the effect of messages compounded of many assertions on the overall size of a Galileo space. A Galileo space is a space within which objects and attributes are arrayed in such a way that the differences in meaning between any two objects in the space is given by the distances between those objects. Thus attributes that seem to be similar are located close to each other, and objects which are seen to embody a given attribute are located close to that attributes. Similarly, objects thought to be similar to each other are located close to each other. Results show that, following approximately a ten hour latency period, the space shows a substantial increase in size, followed by a return to its original dimensions. There is some indication that the expansion of the space may be periodic, which gives rise to the possibility that human beliefs and attitudes may be modelled as a damped oscillating system. Should this be the case, human cognitive processes, such as attitude and belief changes, might be modelled by the equations for dampled oscillations.