Extortion strategies can dominate any opponent in an iterated prisoner's dilemma game. But if players are able to adopt the strategies performing better, extortion becomes widespread and evolutionary unstable. It may sometimes act as a catalyst for the evolution of cooperation, and it can also emerge in interactions between two populations, yet it is not the evolutionarily stable outcome. Here we revisit these results in the realm of spatial games. We find that pairwise imitation and birth-death dynamics return known evolutionary outcomes. Myopic best response strategy updating, on the other hand, reveals counterintuitive solutions. Defectors and extortioners coarsen spontaneously, which allows cooperators to prevail even at prohibitively high temptations to defect. Here extortion strategies play the role of a Trojan horse. They may emerge among defectors by chance, andonce they do, cooperators become viable as well. These results are independent of the interaction topology, and they highlight the importance of coarsening, checkerboard ordering, and best response updating in evolutionary games.
COBISS.SI-ID: 20361224
Deliberate deceptiveness intended to gain an advantage is commonplace in human and animal societies. In a social dilemma, an individual may only pretend to be a cooperator to elicit cooperation from others, while in reality he is a defector. With this as motivation, we study a simple variant of the evolutionary prisonerʼs dilemma game entailing deceitful defectors and conditional cooperators that lifts the veil on the impact of such two-faced behavior. Defectors are able to hide their true intentions at a personal cost, while conditional cooperators are probabilistically successful at identifying defectors and act accordingly. By focusing on the evolutionary outcomes in structured populations, we observe a number of unexpected and counterintuitive phenomena. We show that deceitful behavior may fare better if it is costly, and that a higher success rate of identifying defectors does not necessarily favor cooperative behavior. These results are rooted in the spontaneous emergence of cycling dominance and spatial patterns that give rise to fascinating phase transitions, which in turn reveal the hidden complexity behind the evolution of deception.
COBISS.SI-ID: 20914440
In this paper, we focus on the area of public finances, where the consequences of recession and government's responses to its effects significantly influenced some macroeconomic categories. Government deficits and government debts increased and collected revenues dropped. In addition, the economic crisis influenced a basic element of modern tax systems, i.e. tax compliance, where the consequence has been an increase in the tax debt. Data for Slovenia show that the amount of outstanding tax obligations during the recession increases, while the amount of collected revenues simultaneously drops. Thus, in 2011, the amount of tax debt grew to over 0.9 billion EUR, which is equivalent to the deficit in the general public finance budget. In our analysis, we examine the influence the recession has had on tax compliance in Slovenia. As a measure for non-compliance, we used data on tax debt (unpaid taxes). On the basis of the tax debt fluctuations and the results of regression model, we have discovered that economic fluctuations have significantly influenced the level of tax compliance. As significant explanatory variables, we point to the fluctuations of the average wages in the private sector and also the unemployment rate, which has been steadily increasing during the course of the recession. We also believe that the possibility for less restrictive measures of fiscal policy during the times of economic recession (tax enforcement activities, temporary reprieves, and instalment plans) is worth discussing.
COBISS.SI-ID: 512673840
Although most studies proves that Cross-Border Mergers and Acquisitions (C-B M&A) cause more benefits than threats, the real economic policy in the EU countries offsets the fear that liberalization of inward C-B M&A would endanger economic position of strategic industries and thus national economic goals. After the adoption of EU Directive 2004/25/EC on Takeover Bids the era of fast growth of inward C-B M&A in the EU and consequently the era of rising interventionism so as to protect national strategic industries and companies has started. Additional stimulus for the European Union´s (EU) most developed economies to exercise interventionism was financial and economic crisis starting in 2008. Considering high ranking of employment goals and state-supported social cohesion in continental Europe, it is not surprise that interventionist reactions came from ruling parties and coalitions regardless their political orientation. By the help of the results of their 2009 empirical study on C-B M&A authors tested the relation between the results referring to C-B M&A effects on strategic sectors and the Heritage Foundation Index of Investment Freedom. With combining the results from 2009 study with Index of Investment Freedom from 2009 and in the second equation with index from 2014 authors checked if strategic sectors benefit from incoming C-B M&A when subject to the previous market oriented industrial policy. Both estimated equations proves that unlike with sheltering economic policy, when subject to market conform measures of industrial policy, strategic sectors will benefit from inward C-B M&A. By proving the statistical significant relationship between the results from 2009 study and Index from 2014 authors also proved the statistical and analytical quality of the equation from 2009. By proving statistical significance of the second equation we proved that the judgement of the academic community could be considered relevant also after five years following the real experience as basis of their judgement.
COBISS.SI-ID: 11817500
There are many reasons why Slovenia needs to change its management of network industry infrastructure and question the legacy we wish to pass onto the next generation. However, these issues are not at the forefront of the public debate despite being as relevant today as the pension reform, if not even more. Until now, no government in Slovenia has adopted a systemic approach to infrastructure-related issues; instead, they have let partial interests prevail. This paper and the vision of infrastructure management present a synthesis of the current state of profession and past experiences in infrastructure management and financing acquired by the most developed countries, as well as practical experiences concerning the regulation, financing, and management of network industry infrastructure. The practical experience and empirical findings call for a consistent use of the RAB principles and for the restructuring of certain and partial privatization of all network industries. Foreign experience tells us that if the changes are correctly implemented, the current state of infrastructure can be significantly improved and could lead to a considerable decrease in real infrastructure costs and/or an increase in the availability of funds for infrastructure renovation or expansion. In the future, EU regulations might also expand and raise their requirements to meet the state of the art, but Slovenia need not wait for the EU. The introduction of such a policy would also mean a quantum leap in terms of the competitiveness of Slovenia's economy and bring the country closer to the world's most developed economies.
COBISS.SI-ID: 4339630