[Editor’s Note: In the current public policy debate on Social Security reform, it has been proposed that a portion of the Social Security Trust Funds be invested in the equities markets as a way of providing additional income to the Social Security program. In this paper, Dr. Lawrence White analyzes the proposal and points out the difficult issues it raises—including who would bear the risk rel...

This article discusses different types of “argumentativeness” in three memes related to overweight jokes posted a community meme generation (quickmeme.com) July 2021. We aim show how visual argument, image rhetoric, and social prejudice devices enable the creation “joking” that frame an audience's meaning-making towards prejudiced ideas. The methodological procedure was based on analytical proc...

Recent years have seen an increasing interest of multiagent system research in employing the theory of argumentation for the development of communication protocols. While significant progress has been made in formalising argument-based communication, (possibly adaptive) agent-level argumentation strategies as a practical integration of rational agent reasoning and inter-agent dialogue have rece...

Cooperation is a fundamental form of social interaction, and turn-taking reciprocity one of its most familiar manifestations. The Centipede game provides a formal model of such alternating reciprocal cooperation, but a backward induction (BI) argument appears to prove logically that instrumentally rational players would never cooperate in this way. A systematic review of experimental research r...

The relations between rationality and optimization have been widely discussed in the wake of Herbert Simon’s work, with the common conclusion that the rationality concept does not imply the optimization principle. The paper is partly concerned with adding evidence for this view, but its main, more challenging objective is to question the converse implication from optimization to rationality, wh...

In the health systems literature one can see discussions about the trade off between the equity achievable by the system and its efficiency. Essentially it is argued that as greater health equity is achieved, so the level of efficiency will diminish. This argument is borrowed from economics literature on market efficiency. In the application of the economic argument to health, however, serious ...

This study has reviewed the lived experience of social and cultural active Kurdish women using qualitative methods and the Grounded Theory. The purpose of this study is identifying their attitude and practical responses to "gender inequality". Due to comparing two different aspects of these women's lived experience, at the end of the study, two paradigmatic models are obtained. The analysis of ...