Some notes on Church's thesis and the theory of games

This paper considers games in normal form played by Turing Machines. The machines are fed as input all the relevent information and then are required to play the game. Some impossibility results are derived for this set-up. In particular, it is shown that no Turing Machine exists which will always play the correct strategy given its opponent's choice. Such a result also generalizes to the case in which attention is restricted to economically optimizing machines only. The paper also develops a model of knowledge. This allows the main results of the paper to be interpreted as stemming out of the impossibility of always deciding whether a player is rational or not in some appropriate sense.     

Uncertainty and Risk in Financial Markets

This paper considers a general equilibrium model in which the distinction between uncertainty and risk is formalized by assuming agents have incomplete preferences over state‐contingent consumption bundles, as in Bewley (1986). Without completeness, individual decision making depends on a set of probability distributions over the state space. A bundle is preferred to another if and only if it has larger expected utility for all probabilities in this set. When preferences are complete this set is a singleton, and the model reduces to standard expected utility. In this setting, we characterize Pareto optima and equilibria, and show that the presence of uncertainty generates robust indeterminacies in equilibrium prices and allocations for any specification of initial endowments. We derive comparative statics results linking the degree of uncertainty with changes in equilibria. Despite the presence of robust indeterminacies, we show that equilibrium prices and allocations vary continuously with underlying fundamentals. Equilibria in a standard risk economy are thus robust to adding small degrees of uncertainty. Finally, we give conditions under which some assets are not traded due to uncertainty aversion.     

A Social‐Cognitive Model of Pandemic Influenza H1N1 Risk Perception and Recommended Behaviors in Italy

The outbreak of the pandemic influenza H1N1 2009 (swine flu) between March and April 2009 challenged the health services around the world. Indeed, misconceptions and worries have led the public to refuse to comply with precautionary measures. Moreover, there have been limited efforts to develop models incorporating cognitive, social‐contextual, and affective factors as predictors of compliance with recommended behaviors. The aim of this study was to apply a social‐cognitive model of risk perception and individual response to pandemic influenza H1N1 in a representative sample of Italian population. A sample of 1,010 Italians of at least 18 years of age took part in a telephone survey. The survey included measures of perceived preparedness of institutions, family members and friends’ levels of worry, exposure to media campaigns (social‐contextual factors), perceived coping efficacy, likelihood of infection, perceived seriousness, personal impact, and severity of illness (cognitive evaluations), affective response and compliance with recommended behaviors. Results demonstrated that affective response fully mediated the relationship between cognitive evaluations and social‐contextual factors (with the exception of exposure to media campaigns) and compliance with recommended behaviors. Perceived coping efficacy and preparedness of institutions were not related to compliance with recommended behaviors.     

Between research and revival. Emerging trends among highly religious young Catholics in Italy

Research shows that Italians’ religiosity is in constant decline. Religious literacy, individual and collective practice, participation in rituals, faith’s transmission and symbols’ sharing seem to be following a slow but inexorable downward trend. Catholic communities are being depopulated and churches are emptying out. These phenomena, already emerging in those generations born during the economic boom, seem to have a greater impact on younger generations: the decline of Catholicism as a socio-cultural phenomenon is characterising our era. Despite those general trends, young generations are not merely abandoning their faith. Even if faith has lost its social function, young Catholics in Italy often cultivate it on an individual level, between the autonomous search for their own spiritual path and the reproduction of forms of high religiosity derived from the family. In some cases, the younger generations show a renewed religiosity, stronger and more secure than that of their parents, which may sometimes involve them in a path of Catholicism’s rediscovery. The article presents and discusses results on highly religious young Catholics deriving from empirical research on intergenerational religious transmission in Italian families, which has been conducted through focus groups and in-depth interviews between 2020 and 2022.     

Living arrangements in Europe: whether and why paternal retirement matters

This paper uses retrospective micro data from eleven European countries to investigate the role of paternal retirement in explaining children’s decisions to leave the parental home. To assess causality, I use a bivariate discrete-time hazard model with shared frailty and exploit over time and cross-country variation in early retirement legislation. Overall, the results indicate a positive and significant influence of paternal retirement on the probability of first nest-leaving of children residing in Southern European countries, for both sons and daughters. Focusing on Southern Europe, I find that the increase in children’s nest-leaving around the time of paternal retirement does not appear to be justified by changes in parental resources. Rather, channels involving the supply of informal child care provided by grandparents or the quality of the home should be the focus of study.     

“I Know That You Know How I Feel”: Behavioral and Physiological Signals Demonstrate Emotional Attunement While Interacting with a Computer Simulating Emotional Intelligence

Human–human communication studies have suggested that within communicative interactions, individuals acknowledge each other as intentional agents and adjust their emotion nonverbal behavior according to the other. This process has been defined as emotional attunement. In this study, we examine the emotional attunement process in the context of affective human–computer interactions. To this purpose, participants were exposed to one of two conditions. In one case, they played with a computer that simulated understanding of their emotional reactions while guiding them across four different game-like activities; in the other, the computer guided participants across the activities without mentioning any ability to understand emotional responses. Face movements, gaze direction, posture, vocal behavior, electrocardiogram and electrodermal activity were simultaneously recorded during the experimental sessions. Results showed that if participants were aware of interacting with an agent able to recognize their emotions, they reported that the computer was able to “understand” them and showed a higher number of nonverbal behaviors during the most interactive activity. The implications are discussed.