We present a non-technical account of ambiguity in strategic games and show how it may be applied to economics and social sciences. Optimistic and pessimistic responses to ambiguity are formally modelled. We show that pessimism has the effect of increasing (decreasing) equilibrium prices under Cournot (Bertrand) competition. In addition the effects of ambiguity on peace-making are examined. It ...

The question we address is the following: how do agents that are embedded in large societies — hundreds to millions of agents — focus the enormous potential for interaction with other agents towards the most productive encounters? The relevance of this question needs little argument. From a social studies viewpoint, it is tied to the understanding of a society's structure and how it — implicitl...

We study the social interaction of non-smokers and smokers as a sequential game, incorporating insights from social psychology and experimental economics into an economic model. Social norms affect human behavior such that non-smokers do not ask smokers in their midst to stop smoking, even though the disutility from smoking exceeds the utility from social interaction. Overall, the level of smok...

An important shift is taking place in social cognition research, away from a focus on the individual mind and toward embodied and participatory aspects of social understanding. Empirical results already imply that social cognition is not reducible to the workings of individual cognitive mechanisms. To galvanize this interactive turn, we provide an operational definition of social interaction an...

In [31] a theory of human computation, analogous to Turing’s theory of machine computation is discussed. The issue there is whether there might be an analogue to Church’s thesis in this human domain. Examples of human algorithms discussed include the making of scrambled eggs. By comparison, Lynn Stein in this volume discusses the making of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Neither she nor us ...

This paper explores Bourdieu's account of a relational social space, and his relative neglect of social interaction within this framework. Bourdieu includes social capital as one of the key relational elements of his social space, but says much less about it than economic or cultural capital, and levels of social capital are rarely measured in his work. Bourdieu is reluctant to focus on the con...