Individual rationality and societal rationality

30^th May 2012, 16:00 G12
Prof. R. Ramanujam
Institute of Mathematical Sciences
Chennai
India

Abstract

We study a game model to highlight the mutual recursiveness of individual
rationality and societal rationality. These are games that change
intrinsically based on the actions / strategies played by the players.
There is an implicit player - the society, who makes actions available to
players and incurs certain costs in doing so. If and when it feels that
an action $a$ is being played by a small number of players and/or it
becomes too expensive for it to maintain the action 'a', it removes 'a'
from the set of available actions. This results in a change in the game
and the players strategise afresh taking this change into account.

We study the question: which actions of the players should the society
restrict and how should it restrict them so that the social cost is
minimised in the eventuality? Conversely, given rules by which society
restricts, how should players strategise to achieve given objectives ?