ABSTRACT
As the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 illustrates, controlling the behavior of social agents is a difficult problem. This study examines the potential for an immune-inspired technique called necrosis to steer the behavior of agent populations that are evolving to play the iterated version of the game prisoner's dilemma. A key factor in this is detection of behavioral types. The use of a previously developed technique for fingerprinting the behavior of game playing agents, even complex ones, permits the modelling of control strategies with necrotic behavioral control (NBC). NBC consists of reducing the fitness of agents engaging in an unacceptable behavior. The impact of applying necrosis to a number of agent behaviors is investigated. The strategies always-defect, always-cooperate, and tit-for-two-tats are used as the foci for behavior control by zeroing out the fitness of agents whose behavior is similar to those agents. Our experiments demonstrate that NBC changes the distribution of prisoner's dilemma strategies that arise both when the focal strategy is changed and when the similarity radius used to zero out agent fitness is changed. Filtration focused on the strategy tit-for-two-tats has the largest impact on the evolution of prisoner's dilemma strategies while always cooperate is found to have the least. © 2021 IEEE
ABSTRACT
Corporate borrowing has substantially changed over the last two decades. In this article, we investigate changes in borrowing of US publicly listed firms along trends in five key areas: (a) the funding mix of firms and the importance of balance-sheet versus off-balance-sheet borrowing;(b) the costs of corporate borrowing;(c) trends in nonprice loan terms;(d) the importance of banks versus nonbank institutional investors;and (e) the purpose for corporate borrowing. We explore these trends graphically over the 2002-2019 period, provide a narrative for these trends based on the theoretical and empirical literature in the respective areas, and discuss some implications for the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Finally, we document these trends for firms in the Eurozone countries and delineate similarities and differences.
ABSTRACT
A new AI system is being developed to optimize vaccination strategies based on the structure and shape of a community's social contact network. The technology is minimally constrained and not hound by preconceived notions or human biases. With this come novel outside the box strategies;however, the system is only capable of optimizing what it is instructed to optimize, and does not consider any ethical or political concerns. With the growing concern for systematic discrimination as a result of artificial intelligence, we acknowledge a number of relevant issues that may arise as a consequence of our new technology and categorize them into three classes. We also introduce four normative ethical approaches that are used as a framework for decision-making. Despite the focus on vaccination strategies, our goal is to improve the discussions surrounding public concern and trust over artificial intelligence and demonstrate that artificial intelligence practitioners are addressing these concerns.