Cooperation Via Intimidation: An Emergent System of Mutual Threats can Maintain Social Order

Cooperation via Social Networks

Sufficiently frequent interaction between partners has been identified by, a.o., Axelrod as a more-or-less sufficient condition for stable cooperation. The underlying argument is that rational cooperation is ensured if short-term benefits from opportunistic behavior are offset by the long-term costs of sanctions imposed on the culprit. This argument does not require that these sanctions are (on...

The leading eight: social norms that can maintain cooperation by indirect reciprocity.

The theory of indirect reciprocation explains the evolution of cooperation among unrelated individuals, engaging in one-shot interaction. Using reputation, a player acquires information on who are worth cooperating and who are not. In a previous paper, we formalized the reputation dynamics, a rule to assign a binary reputation (good or bad) to each player when his action, his current reputation...

Mobility can promote the evolution of cooperation via emergent self-assortment dynamics

The evolution of costly cooperation, where cooperators pay a personal cost to benefit others, requires that cooperators interact more frequently with other cooperators. This condition, called positive assortment, is known to occur in spatially-structured viscous populations, where individuals typically have low mobility and limited dispersal. However many social organisms across taxa, from cell...

Toxins: EsTablishEd and EmErgEnT ThrEaTs

How can Social Herding Enhance Cooperation?

We study a system in which N agents have to decide between two strategies θi (i ∈ 1 . . . N), for defection or cooperation, when interacting with other n agents (either spatial neighbors or randomly chosen ones). After each round, they update their strategy responding nonlinearly to two different information sources: (i) the payoff ai(θi, fi) received from the strategic interaction with their n...