The Justine Lambert Prize is awarded by LPS every other year to the best paper submitted by a graduate student dealing with "foundational issues in the formal, natural or social sciences, using tools, methods and results from scientific practice to cast light on the conceptual, philosophical, and scientific relevance of those issues". The Lambert Prize competition is open to all graduate students at the University of California, Irvine, regardless of department or school affiliation. The exact amount of the Prize has varied slightly from year to year. In 2007 it was $2000.  

The Lambert Prize was made possible by a generous  bequest from the sons and friends of Justine Lambert. 

Past winners of the Prize are the following. (The pattern of awarding the Prize in alternating years was first established in 2005.)

2007:  Rory Smead (LPS) for his paper "The Evolution of Cooperation in the Centipede Game with Finite Population". Smead's paper addresses the issue of how cooperation displayed by subjects in the Centipede game can be reconciled with the predictions of traditional game theory, according to which a rational agent will always play the backward induction solution of the game, which allows for no cooperative behavior. The subjects' cooperative behavior cannot even be explained on the standard, infinite-population evolutionary approach. Smead proposes instead to use a finite-population evolutionary approach that provides an explanation of cooperation that is not available to the standard models. As a further theoretical fall-out, Smead's paper casts further light on the proper use of otherwise helpful idealizations in scientific practice.

2005:  Kevin Zollman (LPS) for his paper "Talking to Neighbors: The Evolution of Regional Meaning." Zollman's paper analyzes the effect of adding communication and social structure to previous models of the evolution of cooperation.  Following previous work by Skyrms and Alexander, he analyzes a variant of the Stag Hunt and Lewis Signaling game using a two-dimensional spatial structure.  He determines that these two additions, when used in tandem, result both in an increase in cooperation and an explanation for persistent diversity in conventional behavior (like language).

2002:  Christopher Dopher (Mathematical Behavioral Sciences) for his paper "On Invariance Properties of Empirical Laws". In his paper, Doble investigates issues connected with the invariance of scientific laws under certain transformations, such as, typically, different representations of the variables. Generalizing previous work of J-C. Falmagne and L. Narens, Doble specifies conditions sufficient for alternative interpretations of this notion of invariance to be equivalent.