nucleation

LIT-1515: Optimal Payoff Functions for Members of Collectives

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StatusUnavailable — filed 2026-10-24 for difference rewards (the Wonderful Life Utility); a reading was attempted the same day and failed on access to a lawful copy. The version of record is closed at World Scientific; Unpaywall and OpenAlex report it closed with no repository copy. The second author's publications page at Oregon State (web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~ktumer), which lists the paper, failed certificate verification through this client's proxy and returned 503 to a second fetcher. CiteSeerX, which OpenAlex lists, reset every connection. It is not on arXiv (both authors' arXiv listings checked) or NASA NTRS. A copy is posted on a third party's course-library server (jmvidal.cse.sc.edu), not by the authors or their institution; it was not used. The closest lawful text, the authors' NASA report of the same programme with a near-identical abstract, is filed and read as LIT-1506. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied or the author's page can be reached. No NOTE is filed.
Tagscomplex-systems, game-theory, anthology-candidate

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Wolpert, D. H. & Tumer, K. (2001). Optimal payoff functions for members of collectives. Advances in Complex Systems 4(2–3): 265–279. doi:10.1142/S0219525901000188. Reprinted in F. Schweitzer (ed.), Modeling Complexity in Economic and Social Systems (World Scientific, 2002), pp. 355–369.

Not read. The summary is drawn from the abstract. The authors’ NASA report of the same programme (LIT-1506, read in NOTE-1153) states the factoredness condition, the Wonderful Life Utility and an optimal clamping parameter, with a near-identical abstract. This paper’s abstract adds a new mathematical framework, the Aristocrat Utility and a comparison with endogenized externalities, none of which the report contains; a reading should start there.

Why this is here

Registered 2026-10-24 for difference rewards, the Wonderful Life Utility: the world utility minus its value with one member’s contribution removed. The lead read it as answering “what if this process had not acted”, for CLAIM-446’s identifiability and QUESTION-270’s unheeded processes. COMA (LIT-1517) cites it as the source of its counterfactual baseline and of the “aristocrat utility”. What the report shows about the question is in NOTE-1153.

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