What Is Social Software?

Abstract

The first third (roughly) of the XXth century saw two important developments. One of these was Ramsey’s tracing of personal probabilities to an agent’s choices. This was a precursor to the work of de Finetti, von Neumann and Morgenstern, and Savage. The other one was Turing’s invention of the Turing machine and the formulation of the Church-Turing thesis according to which all computable functions on natural numbers were recursive or Turing computable. Game theory has depended heavily on the first of these developments, since of course von Neumann and Morgenstern can be regarded as the fathers of Game theory. But the other development has received less attention (within Game theory itself). This development led to the design of computers and also to fields like logic of programs, complexity theory and analysis of algorithms. It also resulted in much deeper understanding of algorithms, but only computer algorithms. Social algorithms remain largely unanalyzed except in special subfields like social choice theory or fair division [5]. These fields do not tend to analyze complex social algorithms as is done in computer science. This paper illustrates the different ingredients that make up social software: logical structure, knowledge and incentives.