SEPTEMBER 2018

REVIEWS
Humans may have values – but how do we act on them?
Values and
Behavior: Taking
A Cross Cultural
Perspective,
ed. Sonia
Roccas and
Lilach Sagiv
(Springer
International,
2017) £87.50
This fascinating collection takes at how values affect
human behaviour, with the writers taking a cultural
perspective to examine the link between principles
and action.
Values are important – not least to the co-op
movement, which has developed its own, central
to its identity. But a key question, crucial to this
analysis, is the definition of “value”. Here, the
writers define them as cognitive representations of
basic motivations. Values “are inherently positive,
they represent desirable goals and reflect what
people consider important and worthy,” they argue.
The book goes on to examine social psychologist
Shalom H. Schwartz’s theory of personal values,
which suggested that values differ in the type of
motivational goal they express. But the authors also
consider previous studies,
taking in more than 20
years of research on
the topic. And it argues
that values transcend
specific circumstances.
Giving examples
of existing literature,
they explain that
a person who views
concern for others as
an important value in
the work context is also
likely to attribute high
importance to this value
in other social contexts.
People also see their own
values as more desirable
and closer to their
ideal self than their
personality traits.
Co-Utility –
Theory and
Applications,
Josep Domingo-
Ferrer and David
Sánchez (Springer
International
2018) £119.99
Finding co-operation’s selfish gene
Co-utility takes a novel look at ideas of mutually
beneficial collaboration, asking where selfish
behaviour might fit into such systems.
The book argues that protocols based on mutually
beneficial co-operation can improve social welfare.
It describes the concept of co-utility as a framework
for co-operation between rational agents so that
they help each other achieve their best outcomes.
Domingo-Ferrer and Sánchez give the examples
of peer-to-peer networks for sharing of distributed
resources or virtual money as incentives to achieve
self-enforcing collaboration.
The book provides an overview of existing game
theory, looking at sequential moves – where, at the
time of choosing a move, previous moves made by
other agents are known. In a perfect-information
game, the agent who is about to make the move has
complete knowledge of the previous moves made
by other agents.
Co-utility is reminiscent of co-operative game
theory. But this model is based on the assumption
that each agent acts autonomously and keeps to
themselves the payoff they get, rather than dividing
it among the agents of a coalition, as happens in
co-operative games.
Where could this model be applied? Imagine
web search engines that are based on a co-utility
protocol for exchanging queries between users. In
the collaborative economy, such a protocol could
help to introduce artificial incentives like distributed
reputation or quality of service. Reputation
management would also need to be designed
to be co-utile.
A file-sharing system only works if agents share
files, rather than simply downloading other agents’
files. But by incorporating rewards in the form of
artificial utility, such as reputation, the problem can
be tackled.
The authors add that co-utility principles can
help to design a mechanism which ensures that
helping others is the best rational option, even for
selfish players.
48 | SEPTEMBER 2018