Between-group competition, intra-group cooperation and relative performance

The Inter-Group Comparison – Intra-Group Cooperation Hypothesis: Comparisons between Groups Increase Efficiency in Public Goods Provision

Identifying methods to increase cooperation and efficiency in public goods provision is of vital interest for human societies. The methods that have been proposed often incur costs that (more than) destroy the efficiency gains through increased cooperation. It has for example been shown that inter-group conflict increases intra-group cooperation, however at the cost of collective efficiency. We...

Asymmetry within social groups: division of labour and intergroup competition

Social animals vary in their ability to compete with group members over shared resources and also vary in their cooperative efforts to produce these resources. Competition among groups can promote within-group cooperation, but many existing models of intergroup cooperation do not explicitly account for observations that group members invest differentially in cooperation and that there are often...

Social Exchange and Coalition in Intra-Group Cooperation and Inter-Group Competition

Evolution of conditional cooperation under multilevel selection

We study the emergence of conditional cooperation in the presence of both intra-group and inter-group selection. Individuals play public goods games within their groups using conditional strategies, which are represented as piecewise linear response functions. Accordingly, groups engage in conflicts with a certain probability. In contrast to previous studies, we consider continuous contribution...

Between-group competition elicits within-group cooperation in children

Aggressive interactions between groups are frequent in human societies and can bear significant fitness costs and benefits (e.g. death or access to resources). During between-group competitive interactions, more cohesive groups (i.e. groups formed by individuals who cooperate in group defence) should out-perform less cohesive groups, other factors being equal (e.g. group size). The cost/benefit...