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We present experimental evidence on the effectiveness of corporate leniency programs. Different from other leniency experiments, ours allows subjects to have free-form communication. We do not find much of an effect of leniency programs. Leniency does not deter cartels. It only delays them. Free-form communication allows subjects to build trust and resolve conflicts. Reporting and defection rates are low, especially when compared to experiments with restricted communication. Indeed, communication is so effective that, with leniency in place, prices are not affected if cartels are fined and cease to exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conclusions about the potential for peace via power-sharing are mixed. For some, power-sharing does little to overcome the commitment problem characterizing a transition from conflict, while others argue that such concessions provide signals of parties' willingness to incur costs. This article develops and tests a new theory, aiming to shed light on the mechanisms through which power-sharing bargains help to overcome the commitment problem. I argue that government parties tend to hold an electoral and military advantage, which heightens incentives for rebel leaders to defect from a settlement prior to conceding their capacity to use violence. Where settlements provide discrete guarantees that offset the risks of electoral defeat and the co-optation of forces, these incentives for pre-emptive defection should be mitigated. I offer a novel disaggregation of provisional power-sharing subtypes, distinguishing between long-term and short-term arrangements. The analysis rests on an original, cross-national dataset of government-and-rebel dyads to negotiated settlements signed between 1975 and 2015 (N = 168). The logistic regression results clearly indicate that power-sharing settlements stipulating 'consociational'-style reforms are significantly more likely to resolve conflict between settlement dyads, all else equal. Meanwhile, standard conceptualizations of power-sharing, which include transitional coalitions and troop integration, appear unlikely to secure rebel commitment beyond the transition period, which helps to explain the contradictory findings in existing research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the Stag Hunt game where two players simultaneously decide whether to cooperate or to choose their outside options (defect). A player's gain from defection is his private information (the type). The two players' types are independently drawn from the same cumulative distribution. We focus on the case where only a small proportion of types are dominant (higher than the value from cooperation). It is shown that for a wide family of distribution functions, if the players interact only once, the unique equilibrium outcome is defection by all types of player. Whereas if a second interaction is possible, the players will cooperate with positive probability and already in the first period. Further restricting the family of distributions to those that are sufficiently close to the uniform distribution, cooperation in both period with probability close to 1 is achieved, and this is true even if the probability of a second interaction is very small. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop a game-theoretic model to explore the question of whether two animals should cooperate in the dangerous activity of obtaining a rich and essential resource. We consider variation in the risks incurred to individuals and in how the activities of the two animals interact to influence the probability of success. We also consider that the animals may be relatives and thus share evolutionary interests. The model is general and can, for instance, be applied to mammalian predators attempting to capture and subdue large and dangerous prey or to female parasitoid wasps that attack and, if successful, paralyse aggressive hosts that then provide the only feeding resource for their offspring. This minimal model of cooperation contains three dimensionless parameters: vulnerability (the ratio between the average time for a lone attacker to subdue the defending resource and the average time for the defender to fatally strike the attacker), the dilution ratio (the extent to which attack by animals acting in tandem reduces a defender's ability to kill its attackers) and the relatedness between the potential attackers. The model predicts that higher values of all three parameters favour cooperation and that for small values cooperation is not evolutionarily stable. Cooperation can arise from an ancestral state of non-cooperation if values of all parameters are sufficiently high but cannot arise among non-relatives, irrespective of other parameter values. Once cooperation has emerged in a population, it can be maintained among non-relatives at modest values of dilution ratio and vulnerability. We discuss these general predictions in particular relation to the parasitoid genus Sclerodermus , in which multiple females may attack unusually large and aggressive hosts and in which host attack behaviour is mediated by kinship. • Essential resources may be rich but also dangerous to acquire. • Foragers may cooperate or defect, exploiting the actions of cooperators. • Game theory predicts cooperation when risks are high and cooperation is synergistic. • Relatedness is essential for cooperation to evolve in populations of defectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A successful CRM strategy sometime requires the firm to unilaterally restructure parts of the exchange relationship with existing customers. This reallocation of marketing resources benefits many customers, although less profitable customer segments are likely to be adversely impacted by such policies. In this study we shed light on the marketing relationship factors that shape how consumers respond to CRM activities involving negative policy changes. The theoretical model tested showed that the level of switching costs and situational self-efficacy modify the behavioral response (acceptance, resistance, and defection) consumers have to negative policy changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With increasing consumer expectations for the quality and safety of agricultural products, intelligent quality detection and gradation have considerable significance in agricultural production. The surface defect is an important indicator of quality, but is classified mainly using inefficient manual identification for “Yuluxiang” pears. Because of the uncertainty and high difficulty of image acquisition in agriculture, the data imbalance between categories is a common problem. For the resolution of these problems, the class balance (CB) was used to re-weight the sigmoid cross-entropy loss (SGM-CE), softmax cross-entropy loss (SM-CE), focal loss (FL) functions in this study. CB-SGM-CE, CB-SM-CE, and CB-FL were used to construct a GoogLeNet network as a convolutional neural network (CNN) generalized feature extractor, and transfer learning was combined to build detection models, respectively. The results showed that CB-SGM-CE, CB-SM-CE, and CB-FL were better than SGM-CE, SM-CE, and FL, respectively. CB-FL achieved the best detection results (F1 score of 0.993–1.000) in 3 CB loss functions. Then, CB-FL was used to construct VGG 16, AlexNet, SqueezeNet, and MobileNet V2 networks based on transfer learning, respectively. Machine learning (ML) and CNN were used to build classification models in this study. Compared with ML models and the other 4 CNN models, the CB-FL-GoogLeNet model achieved the best detection results (accuracy of 99.78%). A system for surface defect detection was developed. The results showed that the testing accuracy of the CB-FL-GoogLeNet model was 95.28% based on this system. This study realizes the surface defect detection of the “Yuluxiang” pear with an unbalanced dataset, and provides a method for intelligent detection in agriculture.

Cultural evolution of cooperation under vertical and non-vertical cultural transmission is studied, and conditions are found for fixation and coexistence of cooperation and defection. The evolution of cooperation is facilitated by its horizontal transmission and by an association between social interactions and horizontal transmission. The effect of oblique transmission depends on the horizontal transmission bias. Stable polymorphism of cooperation and defection can occur, and when it does, reduced association between social interactions and horizontal transmission evolves, which leads to a decreased frequency of cooperation and lower population mean fitness. The deterministic conditions are compared to outcomes of stochastic simulations of structured populations. Parallels are drawn withHamilton's rule incorporating relatedness and assortment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autophagy is the primary intracellular catabolic process for degrading and recycling long-lived proteins and damaged organelles, which maintains cellular homeostasis. Autophagy has key roles in development and differentiation. By using the mouse with liver specific knockout of autophagy related gene 5 (Atg5), a gene essential for autophagy, we investigated the possible role of autophagy in liver regeneration after 70% partial hepatectomy (PHx). Ablation of autophagy significantly impaired mouse liver regeneration, and this impairment was associated with reduced hepatocellular proliferation rate, down-regulated expression of cyclins and tumor suppressors, and increased hepatocellular apoptosis via the intrinsic apoptotic pathway. Ablation of autophagy does not affect IL-6 and TNF-α response after PHx, but the altered hepatic and systemic metabolic responses were observed in these mice, including reduced ATP and hepatic free fatty acid levels in the liver tissue, increased glucose level in the serum. Autophagy is required to promote hepatocellular proliferation by maintaining normal hepatic and systemic metabolism and suppress hepatocellular apoptosis in liver regeneration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social primates constantly face situations in which their preferences collide and they need to engineer strategies to overcome conflicts of interest. Studies with chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes , have found that they use competitive strategies to overcome social dilemmas, maximizing their own benefits while minimizing the loss of rewards. However, little is known about how other primates that rely more on cooperation would overcome similar dilemmas. We therefore presented male–female pairs of common marmosets, Callithrix jacchus (cooperative breeders) with two experiments of an action-based paradigm that creates a conflict of interest over access to an unequal reward distribution. Rather than engaging in mutual defection, marmosets were able to overcome this social dilemma over time, by developing a mix of strategic behaviours (predominantly by females) and tolerance to disadvantageous reward distributions (predominantly by males). This mix of behavioural strategies yielded more and better rewards for the females. Importantly, such a net outcome is consistent with the natural history of this species where females, who carry a high energetic burden of reproduction, tend to be less prosocial and are receivers, rather than donors, in food-sharing events among adults. • We presented marmosets with a social dilemma scenario. • Marmosets avoided mutual defection and strategically overcame the social dilemma. • Females engaged in more strategic behaviours than males and obtained more rewards. • Males usually acted as donors in food-sharing events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What makes a port socialist? While the question of how to turn states into socialist entities was pressing in all of Eastern Europe in the late 1940s, ports played a specific role in this process as they presented some characteristics that counteracted the new socialist regime, mainly the inherent openness and connectedness to foreign goods, people and information. This was especially so in the Czechoslovak port in Hamburg. A relict from the interwar period, this port zone was now located in the western bloc. This article traces the attempts to integrate the Czechoslovak port in Hamburg into the socialist system. These attempts were based on various aspects. Central was the ideological legitimation of using a Western port despite the option of transferring the transit of goods to Eastern German or Polish ports. Another focus was on the hiring of Communist workers, especially at a port outside the eastern bloc. And finally, due to its specific location, the port zone in Hamburg was treated both as a socialist outpost in the West – prone to foreign espionage, smuggling or defection – and as a socialist showcase to the West, representing socialist superiority over the capitalist system, and therefore needed both heightened security measures and special attention to its appearance. Neither of these aspects were promptly implemented. Rather, as is argued in this article, over the course of about a decade, an approximation to these new rules under very specific circumstances was met by both support and opposition from groups as different as local representatives of the port zone, both German and Czech port workers or the British occupation forces in Hamburg. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seth Masket's book Learning From Loss: The Democrats, 2016-2020 draws important lessons from Democrats' postmortem of their 2016 electoral defeat. Chief among these is that, given the party's dependence on white suburban voters and the threat of resurgent Trumpism, they will most likely double down on their risk-averse 2020 strategy, thereby inviting further working-class defections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Russia's annexation of Crimea was carried out as a result of a hybrid operation, combining elements of external aggression and internal rebellion, which was taking place between February 20 and March 26, 2014. The article examines the course and conditions of loyalty crisis in the units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine stationed when in Crimea. The Ukrainian troops did not put up active military reaction to the aggression, although there were many moving acts of moral and symbolic resistance. After the annexation, 70.01% of the military personnel turned over to the occupant or left the service, and only 29.99% remained faithful to Ukraine. The failure of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in Crimea to perform its constitutional duty to defend the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the state was primarily due to the fact that most of the personnel were mentally unprepared for a confrontation with Russia. Most of the soldiers were Crimean locals and shared the pro-Russian political and cultural orientation of the majority of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea's population. At the time of the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych in 2010-2014, the Ukrainian defence sector was dismantled and exposed to Russian influence. In February and March 2014, Russia used a whole spectrum of pressure measures against Ukrainian officers: from friendly persuasion, through demonstration of technological and organizational superiority of Russian forces, to the bribes and intimidation. The post-Maidan Ukrainian authorities realized that most of the Ukrainian soldiers in Crimea were demoralized, and the climate in the Navy Command was almost „treacherous". Most likely because of what was mentioned above, but also considering the general international situation, the order to defend Crimea was not being issued. The Ukrainian soldiers in Crimea were simply to follow by a „hold on" directive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Dirassat in Humanities & Social Sciences is the property of Research & Development of Human Recourses Center (REMAH) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

During World War II, U.S. airmen circulated pernicious rumors about the motives of the hundreds of aircrews who landed in neutral countries. Although investigated and disproven by the leadership of the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF), the rumors persisted in popular memory and ultimately stigmatized the veterans who endured neutral captivity. This essay examines the motives of some airmen who landed in Switzerland, and argues that the stigma associated with neutral captivity resulted in denials of benefits and military decorations to deserving veterans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reciprocity toward a partner's cooperation is a fundamental behavioral strategy underlying human cooperation not only in interactions with familiar persons but also with strangers. However, a strategy that takes into account not only one's partner's previous action but also one's own previous action—such as a win-stay lose-shift strategy or variants of reinforcement learning—has also been considered an advantageous strategy. This study investigated empirically how behavioral models can be used to explain the variances in cooperative behavior among people. To do this, we considered games involving either direct reciprocity (an iterated prisoner's dilemma) or generalized reciprocity (a gift-giving game). Multilevel models incorporating inter-individual behavioral differences were fitted to experimental data using Bayesian inference. The results indicate that for these two types of games, a model that considers both one's own and one's partner's previous actions fits the empirical data better than the other models. In the direct reciprocity game, mutual cooperation or defection—rather than relying solely on one's partner's previous actions—affected the increase or decrease, respectively, in subsequent cooperation. Whereas in the generalized reciprocity game, a weaker effect of mutual cooperation or defection on subsequent cooperation was observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effect of chaotic dynamical states of agents on the coevolution of cooperation and synchronization in a structured population of the agents remains unexplored. With a view to gaining insights into this problem, we construct a coupled map lattice of the paradigmatic chaotic logistic map by adopting the Watts--Strogatz network algorithm. The map models the agent's chaotic state dynamics. In the model, an agent benefits by synchronizing with its neighbors, and in the process of doing so, it pays a cost. The agents update their strategies (cooperation or defection) by using either a stochastic or a deterministic rule in an attempt to fetch themselves higher payoffs than what they already have. Among some other interesting results, we find that beyond a critical coupling strength, which increases with the rewiring probability parameter of the Watts--Strogatz model, the coupled map lattice is spatiotemporally synchronized regardless of the rewiring probability. Moreover, we observe that the population does not desynchronize completely--and hence, a finite level of cooperation is sustained--even when the average degree of the coupled map lattice is very high. These results are at odds with how a population of the non-chaotic Kuramoto oscillators as agents would behave. Our model also brings forth the possibility of the emergence of cooperation through synchronization onto a dynamical state that is a periodic orbit attractor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Presidents with no possibility of re-election overvalue far-future rewards and succumb to terminal logic behavior (TLB), responding to end-of-tenure legacy concerns despite political context. Government authorities perceiving the outgoing government is losing power at the end of term behave under the logic of strategic defection (SD), dissociating from the outgoing government once it is perceived powerless. In countries where re-election is impossible and government turnover and inconstant political parties are concerns, governmental officials at all levels may show TLB and SD during transitions that affect policy sustainability. Objectives This study aimed to understand the context during presidential transitions that makes TLB and SD relevant, whether TLB and SD affect sustainability of food and nutrition security policy (FNSP), and the tactics for navigating transitions that favor sustainability. Methods A case-study design was used with semi-structured qualitative interviews and document review of news articles in Guatemala. Purposeful criteria and snowball sampling were used to recruit 52 policy actors implementing an FNSP across 2 transitions; 252 news articles from the referenced period covering topics on policy programmatic areas were purposefully sampled. Interviews were analyzed using coding and thematic analyses. News articles were analyzed using a priori thematic coding for verifying themes in interviews and data triangulation. Results Governmental officials were replaced by others during transitions; political parties were perceived as inconstant. TLB and SD occurred at all levels and had consequences for sustainability of FNSP: implementation slow-down, dysfunctional collaboration, inefficient use of resources, benefits not reaching targeted groups, and loss of momentum. These occurred through individual, institutional, and political mechanisms. Civil society, international organizations, and government adopted tactics for maximizing sustainability. Conclusions Understanding governmental officials' experiences and the extent to which TLB and SD occur and affect sustainability could be advantageous to develop compensatory actions for reaching long-term FNSP goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the alliance partner is found to conduct misbehaviours, will the nonstricken firm respond by defection or sticking together? Drawing on the theory regarding uncertainty in exchange, we propose that partner misbehaviours incur two kinds of uncertainty, identity threat (i.e., possibility of being stigmatized by association) and efficiency threat (i.e., possibility of failure in realizing the goals of alliance). Both identity threat and efficiency threat will drive the nonstricken firm to defect. Our analysis of 457 instances of misbehaviour involving equity-based alliances of Chinese publicly listed firms across 2001–2013 reveals that when partner misbehaviour hurt the nonstricken firm's identity (i.e., identity threat) or affect its rational pursuit of goals (i.e., efficiency threat), the nonstricken firm is more likely to respond by defection. Moreover, we also found that the nonstricken firm's dependence on the alliance weakened the relationships between identity (efficiency) threat and defection. Our results advance our understanding of how firms manage and respond to other firms' misbehaviour in an alliance context, providing an event-based view of alliance dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large literature expects that as protests unfold in electoral autocracies, voters who supported the ruling regime in the past will withdraw support and shift to supporting its opponents. Yet there are only a few empirical tests of how opposition protests influence voter defections in these regimes. To gain empirical traction on this question, I draw on evidence from Russia. Tying together evidence from a protest-event dataset and a panel survey of voters conducted prior to and during the 2011-2012 protest wave, I examine how voters who supported the ruling regime in the past respond to anti-regime mobilization. Results reveal differentiation in defections. While opposition protests dampen support for the ruling regime and depress engagement, they do not necessarily translate into greater support for the regime's challengers. Findings, which have implications for debates on defection cascades in autocracies, speak to the literatures on authoritarian endurance and the legacies of (attempted) revolutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Punishment is crucial to maintain contribution and to prevent defection in societies. Previous research has shown in small groups that cooperation drops (defection rises) and rises (defection drops) immediately when punishment disappears and reappears. I will discuss this effect for large groups (societies), real-world environment in the form of the absence of policing. On the contrary to small group experiments, there are contribution delays and defection delays following punishment disappearance and reappearance. The length of these delays varies and seems to depend on aspects like trust, transparency, media-behavior, or democratic affection. All these aspects have politico-economic implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cooperation among non-kin is well documented in humans and widespread in non-human animals, but explaining the occurrence of cooperation in the absence of inclusive fitness benefits has proven a significant challenge. Current theoretical explanations converge on a single point: cooperators can prevail when they cluster in social space. However, we know very little about the real-world mechanisms that drive such clustering, particularly in systems where cognitive limitations make it unlikely that mechanisms such as score keeping and reputation are at play. Here, we show that Trinidadian guppies (Poecilia reticulata) use a 'walk away' strategy, a simple social heuristic by which assortment by cooperativeness can come about among mobile agents. Guppies cooperate during predator inspection and we found that when experiencing defection in this context, individuals prefer to move to a new social environment, despite having no prior information about this new social group. Our results provide evidence in non-human animals that individuals use a simple social partner updating strategy in response to defection, supporting theoretical work applying heuristics to understanding the proximate mechanisms underpinning the evolution of cooperation among non-kin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A vast literature demonstrates that partisanship has a stabilizing impact on politics, as it limits electoral volatility. Recent studies have also shown that polarization increases partisanship, thus contributing to electoral stability. Focusing on Turkey, an unconsolidated and highly polarized democracy, this study investigates the role of partisanship in a comparative context by means of data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems project. I find that Turkey (among more than 40 countries) is a very high-partisanship country, where partisanship greatly shapes the evaluations of short-term determinants of vote and the vote itself. This research also shows that partisanship in Turkey is associated with very low electoral volatility and defection rates. Moreover, the degree of identification also plays a significant role in its impact on volatility and defection. These findings from the Turkish case offer insights and stimulate a new normative debate on the role of partisanship in unconsolidated democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a novel method to optimize the profits of proactive retention campaigns using a machine learning approach to causal inference. Customer defection threatens many industries, prompting companies to deploy targeted, proactive customer retention programs and offers. A conventional approach has been to target customers either based on their predicted churn probability, or their responsiveness to a retention offer. However, both approaches ignore that some customers contribute more to the profitability of retention campaigns than others. This study addresses this problem by defining a profit-based loss function to predict, for each customer, the financial impact of a retention intervention. This profit-based loss function aligns the objective of the estimation algorithm with the managerial goal of maximizing the campaign profit. It ensures (1) that customers are ranked based on the incremental impact of the intervention on churn and postcampaign cash flows, after accounting for the cost of the intervention, and (2) that the model minimizes the cost of prediction errors by penalizing customers based on their expected profit lift. Finally, it provides a method to optimize the size of the retention campaign. Two field experiments affirm that this approach leads to significantly more profitable campaigns than competing models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A diffusion approximation for a randomized 2 × 2-matrix game in a large finite population is ascertained in the case of random payoffs whose expected values, variances and covariances are of order given by the inverse of the population size N. Applying the approximation to a Randomized Prisoner's Dilemma (RPD) with independent payoffs for cooperation and defection in random pairwise interactions, conditions on the variances of the payoffs for selection to favor the evolution of cooperation, favor more the evolution of cooperation than the evolution of defection, and disfavor the evolution of defection are deduced. All these are obtained from probabilities of ultimate fixation of a single mutant. It is shown that the conditions are lessened with an increase in the variances of the payoffs for defection against cooperation and defection and a decrease in the variances of the payoffs for cooperation against cooperation and defection. A RPD game with independent payoffs whose expected values are additive is studied in detail to support the conclusions. Randomized matrix games with non-independent payoffs, namely the RPD game with additive payoffs for cooperation and defection based on random cost and benefit for cooperation and the repeated RPD game with Tit-for-Tat and Always-Defect as strategies in pairwise interactions with a random number of rounds, are studied under the assumption that the population-scaled expected values, variances and covariances of the payoffs are all of the same small enough order. In the first model, the conditions in favor of the evolution of cooperation hold only if the covariance between the cost and the benefit is large enough, while the analysis of the second model extends the results on the effects of the variances of the payoffs for cooperation and defection found for the one-round RPD game. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Cold War defectors were invariably paraded as propaganda trophies. The wider political significance of defections has hitherto been interrogated almost exclusively in an East–West binary. Utilising recently declassified documents from three continents, attention is focused on the elided role played by the developing world in the Cold War asylum story and, specifically, that of non-aligned India. By reinterpreting international responses to three Soviet defections that occurred in India in the 1960s, new light is shed upon political asylum as a source of North–South tension and discord. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When confronted with mass uprisings, governments deploy their security forces for crowd control or repression. However, sometimes security agencies choose to side with the opposition movement. Recent work shows that "fragmentation" contributes to defection: fragmenting the security forces into parallel units leads to oversight problems and grievances among soldiers, which raises the risk of members of the security forces defecting to the opposition movement. However, I argue that the effect on defection is strongly moderated by the circumstances under which states choose to fragment their military: fragmentation for the purpose of security specialization, called "differentiation," even decreases its risk. Employing Bayesian multilevel modeling, the findings corroborate this distinction. The study contributes to the fundamental discussion on civil–military relations, shedding light on why some conflict situations see security defections while others do not. Understanding this phenomenon is a pivotal element to explaining how conflicts develop, escalate, and end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Finitely repeated prisoners' dilemma (PD) is similar to intertemporal allocation. • The current and future selves face strategies similar to the strategies facing players in PD. • The fact that the current and future selves share the same biological body is irrelevant. • If one accepts cooperation in intertemporal allocation, it behooves one to accept cooperation in PD. • If one accepts defection in PD, it behooves one to accept defection in intertemporal allocation. Economists model the choice of the current self in intertemporal allocation as the outcome of identity : the current and future selves belong to the same decision maker by the sheer fact they reside in the same "biological skin" defined by biological identity. The economists should be consistent and likewise model the choice of each player in the prisoner's dilemma or, generally, the social dilemma as the outcome of identity : the selves of the players belong to the same decision maker by the sheer fact they reside in the same "social skin" defined by social identity. If the economists consider cooperation rather than defection to be the rational strategy of the current self in intertemporal allocations, they should be consistent and consider cooperation rather than defection to be the rational strategy of each player in social dilemmas. Symmetrically, if the economists judge defection rather than cooperation to be the rational strategy in social dilemmas, it behooves them to also judge defection rather than cooperation to be the rational strategy in intertemporal allocations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many political contexts, antagonistic actors face a tradeoff. Broadly, they profit from noncooperative actions. But taking those actions signals unfriendly preferences to their targets, who may then take proactive countermeasures to mitigate the damage of later defections. We develop a model to investigate how actors can manipulate the signaling incentives. We show that the target best avoids initial defections when the cost and effectiveness of countermeasures fall in a middle region. Although antagonists find misrepresentation profitable, the initial cooperation that uncertainty induces gives impatient targets a greater overall payoff than with complete information. As a result, impatient targets may want to pre-commit to less attractive countermeasures to enjoy the benefits of initial cooperation. We illustrate the mechanism with a case study of the Soviet and American policy toward Central-Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the summer of 1962, the political police had an extraordinary case in Hungary. Béla Lapusnyik, a police sergeant with the Interior Ministry, committed the crime of illegally crossing the border to Austria during the night of 8 May. His act was regarded as treason and generated a series of actions at the ministry. Leaders feared that Lapusnyik could give information to Austrian intelligence, counterintelligence, and even military counterintelligence. This could lead to dangerous consequences for the Hungarian secret agencies. Everybody was certain that Lapusnyik would indeed give sensitive information to Austrian state security, although, ultimately, he could not, as he died under suspicious circumstances in a Vienna hospital. Today, it is certain that Lapusnyik was killed at the behest of the KGB. We do not know who the killer was, but it is already known that Lapusnyik was murdered using a particular liquid poison, called DMS (dimethyl sulphate), which was designed to evaporate from the body's system by the time of his death. This would explain why Austrian autopsy experts were unable to establish poisoning as the cause of death. The poison was created in a special Soviet laboratory. Under the bureaucracy of the Hungarian Interior Ministry, the everyday life of the political police was well -documented. The investigation of this case shows how the framework of State Security could provide great opportunities for a young man and yet radically corrupt his personality. This study concentrates on the investigation of Hungarian State Security services. As background, the author also introduces Béla Lapusnyik, his life, family origin, career, and other details about his illegal border crossing. In conclusion, it summarizes the known facts about how a healthy young man could die as a prisoner of the Austrian state police (Staatspolizei, STAPO). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]