This chapter introduces the three contributions that constitute Part VIII, “Human Society.” They try to understand (1) how different institutions emerge as a result of within-society conflict, and how social and political innovations develop in order to deal with this. (2) The role of sanctions and enforcement, and strategies not just to play the game that society presents us with but to change the game itself. (3) The role of equilibrium selection, endogenous preferences, and the evolution of culture in which the economy is inevitably embedded.

The equilibrium notion of Nash has been the primary tool for predicting strategies and outcomes of games with rational players. But the Nash equilibrium is a weak criterion for games with dynamic interactions and/or private information among the players. Stronger criteria called equilibrium refinements are intended to remedy deficiencies that stem from these features. This chapter summarizes motives for refinements, the main refinements themselves, and reports progress on characterizing the strongest refinement, called stability, via axioms that express basic properties of rational behavior.

This chapter is concerned with multiwinner elections, an emerging topic in the area of computational social choice. Much of the classic literature in social choice theory deals with functions that map ordinal preferences over candidates to a winning candidate or perhaps a ranking of the candidates. The goal of multiwinner elections is to select a fixed-size set of candidates: a committee. This gives rise to new rules as well as new axioms. The chapter focuses on the case of approval-based preferences and axioms capturing the idea of proportional representation.

The literature on learning in games interprets equilibrium strategy profiles as the long-run average behavior of agents who are selected at random to play the game. As suggested by Nash, in normal-form games we expect that as the agents accumulate evidence about play of the game they will develop accurate beliefs, so that the stationary points of the process correspond to the Nash equilibria. The definition of Nash equilibrium applies unchanged to games in extensive form, but the learning foundation for it does change, because in games with a nontrivial extensive form simply playing the game repeatedly may not lead agents to know how their opponents would respond to deviations that the agents have not tried. Thus there is no reason to expect learning by myopic agents to lead to Nash equilibrium in general games, as agents may not experiment enough to learn the consequences of deviating from the equilibrium path. Instead, learning is consistent with self-confirming equilibrium, introduced by Fudenberg and Levine in the early 1990s. The focus here is on settings where the agents are patient, so they do have an incentive to experiment. In this case, Nash’s mass action interpretation of equilibrium is again valid. But extensive-form games typically have many equilibria, and not all of them seem equally plausible. An advantage of the learning approach is that some actions that are off-path according to the limiting equilibrium distribution are not counterfactual, but will actually be played by young agents as “experiments,” so that equilibrium refinements can be derived from properties of optimal experimentation.

We briefly survey the state of the art for mean field games without entering any technical/mathematical details. We review both the existing mathematical results and the modeling toolbox. We also mention a few applications. After describing a new numerical approach, we conclude with a few perspectives.

This chapter introduces the three contributions that constitute Part II, “Mathematics of Game Theory and Its Foundations.” Those concern (1) mean field games, (2) value and equilibrium in zero-sum games, and (3) refinements of Nash equilibrium.

Given strong common interests in avoiding mass killing and economic devastation, or even the relatively small negative economic effects of some low-level internal conflicts, why do these conflicts occur? Human affairs are too complex, messy, and interesting for any one angle to provide a fully satisfactory answer, and particularly an angle as schematic and bloodless as game theory. Even so, work using game-theoretic methods has developed answers that provide useful insights into important strategic dimensions, and that provide plausible explanations for some of the more striking empirical patterns concerning armed conflict in this period. This chapter reviews game-theoretic models of the outbreak and prosecution of large-scale armed conflict as they have developed in particular over the last forty years.

Sourcing e-reality

Any information found online comes with a level of doubt regarding its credibility. The internet is not only bloated with fake news, but the actual information found is often contradictory and, as mentioned in the previous chapter, capable of firing up endless debates. Depending on the source consulted, things can be good and bad at the same time, criminal and lawful, deviant and/or normal. For example, as noted on the academic blog The Conversation, individuals of various age groups worldwide appear to have been engaging in an obscure practice shared online known as ‘jelqing’, which involves violently rubbing their genitals to increase penis size (Taylor, 2024a). This technique has gained popularity through online sources, although it is not widely recognized by medical professionals due to the potential long-term harm and concrete danger of erectile dysfunction. Despite this, information regarding this practice can be found on numerous medical websites, including the popular (yet reasonably contentious) Healthline (Jewell, 2023).

The Onlife not only highlights the subtle influence of everyday toxic narratives – shaping choices and perceptions of symbols – but also exposes the dangerous misuse of otherwise harmless tools that reinforce these radicalizing narratives (Valentini et al, 2020). Once again, rather than the device in one's hand replicating knowledge, it only increases misunderstanding and a gives a false interpretation of things.

Similarly, while working on this chapter, I happened to be shopping in a major Italian supermarket and was approached by an elderly lady who could not read the symbols on the back of a bag of coffee. Close to my ear, the lady claimed that ‘no matter my beliefs’, I should be wary of the ‘handshaking symbol’ on the back of products.

With the corporate conceptualization of the ‘metaverse’ (Beer, 2022), and the exponential ‘Onlife’ digital existence brought forward by the pandemic, a whole new frontier of ‘meta-crime’ (Lloyd, 2021) has unfolded with the profiling of, and profiteering from, European and global users’ information. This chapter attempts to sketch the connection between data and harm (Redden, 2018) by addressing the issue as an epistemological problem: when considering the word ‘data’ (Latin, datum), it translates into something ‘given’. However, a much better definition is something taken, a captum. The data versus capta dichotomy is not novel in the social sciences (Lanigan, 1994; Chippendale, 2000), however, it lacks sufficient information in this high-tech age, particularly in the field of criminology. By addressing and denouncing the elementary zemiology of the capta dynamics, the information mining and coaxing out of Onlife users’ data turns from the digital world's tolerated currency of ‘no-free-lunch’ into a semantically abusive and controversial tool of harm and deviance. This chapter looks at the precedents and implications of this different wording and considers the modes in which capta analysis may be considered and addressed, not only in forming a specific and novel interpretation of meta-crime within a captaverse but as a new way of doing research altogether.

Terms of data collection

A central dilemma posed by this book concerns the method by which data are gathered, and how the word ‘data’ has, in the context of this work, become almost a misnomer – implying something that is not given, but taken.

Culture of observation

In the so-called age of Big Data, all aspects of the everyday become significant elements for monetization. The issue of privacy breaches is still an ongoing concern, but the criminology of this matter can shed light on the secret ways in which the digital world can be utilized to quietly examine and analyse the everyday aspects of individuals.

Already in 2002, Andrejevic defined the concept of ‘lateral surveillance’, involving a unilateral aspect of peer-to-peer monitoring to gain information about friends, family members, and prospective love interests. Andrejevic's work on peer-to-peer surveillance introduced the concept of ‘DIY’ surveillance, where individuals actively engage in monitoring others, often facilitated by online resources. This practice has become especially prevalent in investigating current, potential, or past partners, using spyware integrated into various overt and covert activities. With the false presumption of privacy, the distribution of images and content is universal and ubiquitous, as in Anita Lavorgna et al's study on the criminological harms involved in ‘sharenting’ practices (2022), where parents share and distribute images of their children online, be it on social media or via instant messaging chats. On the one side, we have the menace of ‘paedophilistic’ prey, who may unknowingly collect and share pictures and information about minors.

This chapter discusses the elements of a web-induced digital world where the boundaries between what is concrete and relatable are in perpetual jeopardy, with a constant threat to the distinction between what is real and what is ‘fake’. The advent of deepfake software, which can easily alter faces and manipulate screen interactions, and the implementation of the dark web have given rise to new criminological and zemiological realities. From astroturfing (a deceptive tactic in which organizations or individuals fabricate grassroots support for a cause, product, or idea) and sock-puppets (artificial online identities created by an individual or organization to manipulate discussions, promote products, or influence opinions without disclosing the true source) to catfishing (the act of creating a fake online persona, typically on social media or dating platforms, to deceive another individual), these virtual phenomena gain increasing importance as misinformation proliferates rapidly across the internet. This chapter examines the increasing hijacking of reality, the hyperreal elements within artificial intelligence's (AI’s) potential, and the responsibility of indefinitely altering the ‘Onlife’ dimension.

Creeping abnormalities

Most of this book has been authored by AI. Well, no, it has not. But as a reader, you would not necessarily know that – at least not yet, or in this edition. My ‘name’ is on the cover, and you might assume I conducted most of the work and research. However, that's not necessarily the case. While Leonardo da Vinci's original handwritten notes of his various Codex are accessible, contestable, and comparable, the digital authorship of the very words you are reading – printed, shared, and digitized – is about as anonymous as it gets.

Closing the (first) circle

In Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novel In the First Circle published in 1968 (Solzhenitsyn, 2009), the 1970 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature explores the lives of prisoners in a Soviet labour camp during the Stalinist era. Rather than dwelling on the stark horrors of the Siberian nightmare, as Arthur Koestler does in the chilling 1940 novel Midnight at Noon, Solzhenitsyn offers a more nuanced perspective focusing on a softer, quasi-gentle reality, depicted over the course of three days within the ‘sharashka’ section of the Gulag. The ‘sharashka’ is a low-guarded area reserved for scientists and intellectuals who benefit from better conditions than those in the hard-labour camps in exchange for working on experimental and ethically dubious scientific and technical projects for the state.

In contrast to their fellow prisoners in the deadly labour camps, Solzhenitsyn utilizes the metaphor of scientists living in a ‘limbo’ state – like the pagan thinkers in Dante's Inferno. They are decently fed, kept warm, and even allowed an element of romance with their guards. However, the subtle burden of living in an ‘ivory tower’ weighs heavily on the main characters, leading them to question their morality and their sense of freedom, which has been reduced to mere survival within the confines of state-approved silence.

Among the research conducted by the secluded scientists, emphasis is given in the novel to the ‘study’ of the human voice and how an agent may precisely identify and correlate an individual to a specific phone call without reasonable doubt.

Recent years have witnessed a blurring between our day-to-day real-world existence and our online presence. We live our lives both online and offline, switching between the two and often interacting with both at the same time. Talk of a metaverse and an Internet of things further blurs these boundaries. In this way it makes less sense to have a neat divide between what is real and what is virtual. Instead, by drawing on Luciano Floridi and colleagues (2015), we can think in terms of an ‘Onlife’ existence, both online and real life, one impacting the other in a hyperconnected reality. In this important book Janos Mark Szakolczai develops this idea and applies it to criminology. While there have been books on cybercriminology, Janos takes this further by considering the harms and/or crimes that are possible in an Onlife world, in those blurred spaces between real world and online world.

Books in the New Horizons in Criminology series provide concise authoritative texts that reflect cutting-edge thought and theoretical developments in criminology and are international in scope. The aim is for them to be written so that the non-specialist academic, student, or practitioner can understand them by explaining ideas clearly before going deeper into the subject. This is the approach Janos has taken with this book. It starts by looking at the evolution of the internet in Chapter 1, from a utopian space to one where there is control, harm, and criminality.