Browsing by Subject "Game theory"

The need to develop and expand urban areas is increasing in most countries, but urbanization also increases the threat for global biodiversity. Some cities have acknowledged this challenge and formed strategies and action plans for biodiversity preservation. How can we ensure that such strategies are realized in city planning? Negotiations are a crucial part of urban planning, and therefore can be a leverage point of intervention to effectively implement strategies to pro-tect biodiversity. However, little is known about the dynamics of the actual negotiation process in city planning. I applied a game theoretic approach to study how information availability influences the suc-cess and efficiency of negotiations. A role-playing game was used to simulate a negotiation on specific measures to preserve biodiversity in a residential building project. Eleven urban devel-opment specialists played the game with different sets of information. In addition to the direct outcomes of the negotiation, I analysed the post hoc discussion and arguments used to gain in-sights into perceptions of biodiversity-related negotiations in urban planning. Results indicate that information availability can increase the efficiency of negotiations. Partici-pants favour principled and integrative negotiation, but incomplete information seems to push them to take a more positional stance. The post hoc discussion also reveals some issues rele-vant to the design of urban planning process for biodiversity. The overall results suggest that a simple game-theoretic framework, implemented in (a) game-like simulation with quasi-experimental control and (b) qualitative analysis of discussions, holds potential for both under-standing (i) how decision makers frame and resolve the negotiation with conflicting interests and (ii) how to design efficient administrative processes taking into account not only the partic-ipants’ preferences but also wider public interests, such as biodiversity preservation.

The Hawk-Dove game has been used as a model of situations of conflict in diverse fields as sociology, politics, economics as well as animal behavior. The iterated Hawk-Dove game has several rounds with payoff in each round. The thesis is about a version of the iterated Hawk-Dove game with the additional new feature that each player can unilaterally decide when to quit playing. After quitting, both players return to the pool of temporally inactive players. New games can be initiated by random pairing of individuals from within the pool. The decision of quitting is based on a rule that takes into account the actions of oneself or one's opponent, or on the payoffs received during the last or previous rounds of the present game. In this thesis, the quitting rule is that a player quits if its opponent acts as a Hawk. The additional feature of quitting dramatically changes the game dynamics of the traditional iterated Hawk-Dove game. The aim of the thesis is to study these changes. To that end we use elements of dynamical systems theory as well as game theory and adaptive dynamics. Game theory and adaptive dynamics are briefly introduced as background information for the model I present, providing all the essential tools to analyze it. Game theory provides an understanding of the role of payoffs and the notion of the evolutionarily stable strategies, as well as the mechanics of iterated games. Adaptive dynamics provides the tools to analyze the behavior of the mutant strategy, and under what conditions it can invade the resident population. It focuses on the evolutionary success of the mutant in the environment set by the current resident. In the standard iterated Hawk-Dove game, always play Dove (all-Dove) is a losing strategy. The main result of my model is that strategies such as all-Dove and mixed strategy profiles that are also not considered as worthwhile strategies in the standard iterated Hawk-Dove game can be worthwhile when quitting and the pool are part of the dynamics. Depending on the relations between the payoffs, these strategies can be victorious.