Miserable Success

Miserable and strongly miserable impartial games

An impartial game is called (strongly) miserable if its normal and misère versions differ just slightly; more precisely, if some (all) zeros and ones of the Sprague-Grundy (SG) functions swap, while all larger values remain the same. We obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for (strong) miserability and show that NIM, Wythoff’s NIM, and game Euclid are miserable but not strongly miserable,...

On tame, pet, miserable, and strongly miserable impartial games

We consider tame impartial games and develop the Sprague-Grundy theory for misère playing the sum of such games that looks simpler than the classical theory suggested by Conway in 1976, which is based on the concept of genus. An impartial game is called pet if the sets of P-positions of its normal and misère versions are disjoint. We provide several equivalent characterizations and show that th...

Not Only the Miserable Receive Help

Two studies investigated how personand situation-related information elicit empathy and subsequent prosocial behaviour. Results show that congruent information (for example, positive emotion after positive event) elicits more empathy than incongruent information (for example, negative emotion after positive event). The extent of prosocial behaviour was observed to be an additive effect of perso...

Miserable Migrants? Natural Experiment Evidence on International Migration and Objective and Subjective Well-Being

Miserable Migrants? Natural Experiment Evidence on International Migration and Objective and Subjective Well-Being Over 200 million people worldwide live outside their country of birth and typically experience large gains in material well-being by moving to where incomes are higher. But effects of migration on subjective well-being are less clear, with some studies suggesting that migrants are ...

Alcohol in the Third World: a chance to avoid a miserable trap.