Our well-being depends on both our personal success and the success of our society. The realization of this fact makes cooperation an essential trait. Experiments have shown that rewards can elevate our readiness to cooperate, but since giving a reward inevitably entails paying a cost for it, the emergence and stability of such behavior remains elusive. Here we show that allowing for the act of rewarding to self-organize in dependence on the success of cooperation creates several evolutionary advantages that instill new ways through which collaborative efforts are promoted. Ranging from indirect territorial battle to the spontaneous emergence and destruction of coexistence, phase diagrams and the underlying spatial patterns reveal fascinatingly rich social dynamics that explain why this costly behavior has evolved and persevered. Comparisons with adaptive punishment, however, uncover an Achilles heel of adaptive rewarding, coming from over-aggression, which in turn hinders optimal utilization of network reciprocity. This may explain why, despite its success, rewarding is not as firmly embedded into our societal organization as punishment.
COBISS.SI-ID: 19323144
The public goods game is one of the most famous models for studying the evolution of cooperation in sizable groups. The multiplication factor in this game can characterize the investment return from the public good, which may be variable depending on the interactive environment in realistic situations. Instead of using the same universal value, here we consider that the multiplication factor in each group is updated based on the differences between the local and global interactive environments in the spatial public goods game, but meanwhile limited to within a certain range. We find that the adaptive and bounded investment returns can significantly promote cooperation. In particular, full cooperation can be achieved for high feedback strength when appropriate limitation is set for the investment return. Also, we show that the fraction of cooperators in the whole population can become larger if the lower and upper limits of the multiplication factor are increased. Furthermore, in comparison to the traditionally spatial public goods game where the multiplication factor in each group is identical and fixed, we find that cooperation can be better promoted if the multiplication factor is constrained to adjust between one and the group size in our model. Our results highlight the importance of the locally adaptive and bounded investment returns for the emergence and dominance of cooperative behavior in structured populations.
COBISS.SI-ID: 19144712
In this research we propose a new method for retail credit risk modeling. In order to capture possible non-linear relationships between credit risk and explanatory variables, we use a learning vector quantization (LVQ) neural network. The model was estimated on a dataset from Slovenian banking sector. The proposed model outperformed the benchmarking (LOGIT) models, which represent the standard approach in banks. The results also demonstrate that the LVQ model is better able to handle the properties of categorical variables.
COBISS.SI-ID: 10767900
In this paper a presentation of functions of demand for the services of the Slovenian national postal operator is given separately for two market segments: the direct mail and periodicals market and the direct mail market. Two findings are highlighted in particular. First, the price elasticity of demand on both markets is below zero. Second, autonomy in price increases is limited, since the analysis of demand functions for direct mail shows positive cross-price elasticity of demand with regard to price fluctuations for TV commercials. Substitution effects on the direct mail market are even more clearly expressed with regard to price fluctuations for advertisements in magazines and daily papers.
COBISS.SI-ID: 9879580
In this article, we investigate the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) concept by utilizing a database of monthly real exchange rates from 12 Central and Eastern European economies with respect to different numeraire currencies. Owing to the elaborated limitations of linear specifications by verifying this exchange rate theory, we apply a nonlinear unit root test based on the Exponential Smooth Transition Autoregressive (ESTAR) model proposed by Kapetanios et al. (KSS; 2003). Our analysis shows that after taking into account the nonlinear reversion of real exchange rates of European transition economies with respectto the euro, the validity of PPP is confirmed for the majority of countries in the sample.
COBISS.SI-ID: 10988316