Kevin Zollman
Professor of Philosophy and Social and Decision Sciences and Director, Institute for Complex Social Dynamics | Dietrich College of Humanities & Social Sciences Carnegie Mellon University
Professor of Philosophy and Social and Decision Sciences and Director, Institute for Complex Social Dynamics
Biography
Areas of Expertise
Media Appearances
Crowds Are Not People, My Friend
New York Magazine
A discussion about the relationship between individuals and groups. It contains an interview with a collaborator and former student, Conor Mayo-Wilson, about our research on learning in groups.
Not Safe For Funding: The N.S.F. and the Economics of Science
The New Yorker
A piece about the politics and economics of science funding.
Game Theory Secrets for Parents
The Wall Street Journal
An article on using game theory to solve parenting dilemmas.
Why Republicans Are Flip-Flopping On Their Endorsements
The Atlantic
The game theory behind the Republican's attempts to distance themselves from Donald Trump.
How Election 2016 Would Be Different With Ranked-Choice Voting
Newsweek
How our system of voting can (and does) influence electoral outcomes.
The United Airlines Fiasco: How Game Theory Could Help
NPR's Morning Edition
How airlines might use game theory to deal with oversold situations better.
a16z Podcast: The Macro and the Micro of Parenting
Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)
Fabrizio Zilibotti, Kevin Zollman, and Hanne Winarsky
Video interviews on various game theory topcis
Big Think
Recorded a series of short videos for the website BigThink on game theory topics ranging from nuclear war to parenting to poker.
Why Playing Poker, Chess or Bridge Can Make You a Better Investor
The Street
How lessons from games like poker can teach you how to understand game theory and risk.
What Investors Can Learn From the Best Poker Players
The Wall Street Journal
How investors can sometimes make the same mistakes that poker players do.
Media
Social
Education
Kansas State University, Manhattan
B.S.
Philosophy
2002
University of California, Irvine
M.A.
Philosophy
2005
University of California, Irvine
Ph.D.
Philosophy
2007
Dissertation: “Network Epistemology”
Committee: Brian Skyrms (chair), P. Kyle Stanford, and Jeffrey Barrett
Articles
How to End International Tax Competition
New York TimesHow game theory sheds light on the move to lower the corporate tax rate and compete for investment.
Why both Trump and Cruz can claim to represent the majority of Republicans
Los Angeles TimesThe game theory behind voting and primaries was on display in the 2016 GOP primary
Partial honesty in a hummingbird polymorphism provides evidence for a hybrid equilibrium
ctbergstromJay J. Falk, Carl T. Bergstrom, Kevin J. S. Zollman, Alejandro Rico-Guevara
Animal signals, while informative, are unlikely to be entirely reliable. Models of such partially honest
communication have traditionally taken the form of ‘honest-enough’ signalling, in which a subset of
signallers can signal at lower cost and therefore exaggerate their perceived ability or condition.
Exploring the importance of stochasticity to hybrid equilibria in a discrete signaling game
Pub MedJacob Chisausky, Kevin Zollman, Graeme Ruxton
Communication via evolved signals is ubiquitous (both within and between species) in the natural world. However, how honest we should expect signals to be remains an open question.
Academic Journals, Incentives, and the Quality of Peer Review: A Model
Cambridge University PressKevin J. S. Zollman , Julian García and Toby Handfield
We model the impact of different incentives on journal behavior in undertaking peer review. Under one scheme, the journal aims to publish the highest-quality papers; under the second, the journal aims to maintain a high rejection rate.
Explaining costly religious practices: credibility enhancing displays and signaling theories
National Library of MedicineCarl Brusse, Toby Handfield, Kevin J S Zollman
This paper examines and contrasts two closely related evolutionary explanations in human behaviour: signalling theory, and the theory of Credibility Enhancing Displays (CREDs).
Research Focus
Optimal Publishing Strategies
Episteme 6(2): 185-199.
Journals regulate a significant portion of the communication between scientists. This paper devises an agent-based model of scientific practice and uses it to compare various strategies for selecting publications by journals.
The Epistemic Benefit of Transient Diversity
Erkenntnis 72(1):17-35
There is growing interest in understanding and eliciting division of labor within groups of scientists. This paper illustrates the need for this division of labor through a historical example, and a formal model is presented to better analyze situations of this type.
Computer Simulation and Emergent Reliability in Science
Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 14 (4): 15
While the popular image of scientists portrays them as objective, dispassionate observers of nature, actual scientists rarely are. It is not really known to what extent these individual departures from the scientific ideal effects the reliability of the scientific community.
Network Epistemology: Communication in Epistemic Communities
Philosophy Compass 8: 15-27
Much of contemporary knowledge is generated by groups not single individuals. A natural question to ask is, what features make groups better or worse at generating knowledge?
Supplementary Mathematica Notebook
Theories of scientific rationality typically pertain to belief. This paper argues that we should expand our focus to include motivations as well as belief.
The Scientific Ponzi Scheme
Fraud and misleading research represent serious impediments to scientific progress. We must uncover the causes of fraud in order to understand how science functions and in order to develop strategies for combating epistemically detrimental behavior.
The Theory of Games as a Tool for the Social Epistemologist
Traditionally, epistemologists have distinguished between epistemic and pragmatic goals. In so doing, they presume that much of game theory is irrelevant to epistemic enterprises. I will show that this is a mistake.
