While some communities of animals living in groups may develop systems of cooperation or mutual altruism, many other animal societies are characterised by dominance hierarchies. This thesis is concerned with describing the development of cooperation and dominance hierarchies amongst animal groups. By using a game-theoretic framework, I develop and investigate simple models to describe social in...

Social dilemmas, where mutual cooperation can lead to high payoffs but participants face incentives to cheat, are ubiquitous in multi-agent interaction. We wish to construct agents that cooperate with pure cooperators, avoid exploitation by pure defectors, and incentivize cooperation from the rest. However, often the actions taken by a partner are (partially) unobserved or the consequences of i...

Social dilemmas, where mutual cooperation can lead to high payoffs but participants face incentives to cheat, are ubiquitous in multi-agent interaction. We wish to construct agents that cooperate with pure cooperators, avoid exploitation by pure defectors, and incentivize cooperation from the rest. However, often the actions taken by a partner are (partially) unobserved or the consequences of i...

This paper introduces the notion of profile-based cooperation as a way to support awareness and informal communication between mobile users during chance encounters. We describe the design of Proem, a wearable system for profile-based cooperation that enables users to publish and exchange personal profile information during physical encounters. The Proem system is used to initiate contact betwe...

Data replication schemes and mutual exclusion protocols can be regarded as special instances of cooperation schemes, which describe the interaction of independent nodes within a computer network in order to achieve a common goal. This paper presents a new mechanism called General Structured Voting for cooperation management and demonstrates its use for handling instances of these problem domain...

Aggression and cooperation have been the source of many ethology and sociobiology related discussions which have in turn lead to the development of several important models, such as the hawk-dove, cooperator's dilemma and snow-drift games. As these models rarely act in conjunction however, they are considered “separate” means of explaining each phenomenon. Moreover, many of the parameters used ...

Effective Computer Network Defense requires close cooperation and collaboration between government and industry, science and education, national and international efforts. The Netherlands offers a concrete example of a successful public-private partnership aimed at improving overall cyber security for its society in general, including government, industry, and citizens. This requires more that ...

Cooperation based on reciprocal altruism has evolved in only a small number of species, yet it constitutes the core behavioral principle of human social life. The iterated Prisoner's Dilemma Game has been used to model this form of cooperation. We used fMRI to scan 36 women as they played an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma Game with another woman to investigate the neurobiological basis of cooperat...

In a world torn by conflict, how can mutually beneficial cooperation can emerge spontaneously, with no higher authority than the rule of the jungle? History, economics, and especially biology provide many real-world examples of mutual cooperation without any enforcement from a higher authority. This cooperation occurs despite a bloodthirsty option offering more payoff to those might exploit the...

The reciprocal exchange of goods and services among social partners is a conundrum in evolutionary biology because of its proneness to cheating, but also the behavioral and cognitive mechanisms involved in such mutual cooperation are hotly debated. Extreme viewpoints range from the assumption that, at the proximate level, observed cases of "direct reciprocity" can be merely explained by basic i...