Ungrounded Payoffs: A Tale of Perfect Love and Hate

Journal of Philosophy 119 (6):293-323 (2022)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

I explore a game-theoretic analysis of social interactions in which each agent’s well-being depends crucially on the well-being of another agent. As a result of this, payoffs are interdependent and cannot be fixed, and hence the overall assessment of strategies becomes ungrounded. A paradigmatic example of this general phenomenon occurs when both players are ‘reflective altruists’, in a sense to be explained. I argue that ungroundedness cannot be captured by standard games with incomplete information, but that it requires the concept of an underspecified game; underspecified games have radically underdetermined matrices. Players locked in ungroundedness will be assumed to engage simultaneously in an implicit second-order game in which they try to coordinate their first-order matrices. If they fail to coordinate, their first-order interaction cannot be recast as a game in the first place.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 103,486

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Analytics

Added to PP
2022-07-12

Downloads
34 (#698,174)

6 months
4 (#864,415)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references