Predicting Human Cooperation

Predicting Human Cooperation

The Prisoner's Dilemma has been a subject of extensive research due to its importance in understanding the ever-present tension between individual self-interest and social benefit. A strictly dominant strategy in a Prisoner's Dilemma (defection), when played by both players, is mutually harmful. Repetition of the Prisoner's Dilemma can give rise to cooperation as an equilibrium, but defection i...

Human cooperation.

Why should you help a competitor? Why should you contribute to the public good if free riders reap the benefits of your generosity? Cooperation in a competitive world is a conundrum. Natural selection opposes the evolution of cooperation unless specific mechanisms are at work. Five such mechanisms have been proposed: direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, spatial selection, multilevel select...

Predicting Human Cooperation in the Prisoner’s Dilemma Using Case-based Decision Theory

In this paper we show Case-based Decision Theory (Gilboa and Schmeidler, 1995) can explain the aggregate dynamics of cooperation in the repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma, as observed in the experiments performed by Camera and Casari (2009). Moreover, we find CBDT provides a better fit to the dynamics of cooperation than does the existing Probit model, which is the first time such a result has been fo...

Spatial Human Cooperation

Globalization and human cooperation.

Globalization magnifies the problems that affect all people and that require large-scale human cooperation, for example, the overharvesting of natural resources and human-induced global warming. However, what does globalization imply for the cooperation needed to address such global social dilemmas? Two competing hypotheses are offered. One hypothesis is that globalization prompts reactionary m...