Cooperation is a costly behavior undertaken by one individual which benefits another individual. Since cooperators are easily exploited by defectors (those who receive the benefits of cooperation but do not cooperate themselves), the evolution and maintenance of cooperation rely on mechanisms that allow cooperators to interact with one another more frequently than would be predicted based on th...

The paper explores the influence of the type of relations among players on cooperation in the Prisoner’s dilemma game. The relations between players are operationalized according to Fiske’s relational models theory (Fiske, 1991): communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing. This is achieved by using various ways of distributing the total payoff gained by a dyad of...

Fairness and efficiency are important aspects that influence cooperation in social dilemmas. During a repeated interaction, they have the potential to serve as competing goals for the decision maker. The ability to balance between fairness and efficiency depends, among other things, on available information regarding mutual accountability for the outcomes in an interaction. In this paper, we ex...

Classic Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (IPD) has only 2 choices, cooperate or defect. However, most real-world situations offer intermediate responses, between full cooperation and full defection. Previous studies observed that with intermediate levels, mutual cooperation is less likely to emerge, and even if it does it’s less stable. Exactly why has been a mystery. This paper demonstrates two mec...

This work considers a stateless Q-learning agent in iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD). We have already given a condition of PD payoffs and Q-learning parameters that helps stateless Q-learning agents cooperate with each other [2]. That condition, however, has a restrictive premise. This work relaxes the premise and shows a new payoff condition for mutual cooperation. After that, we derive the pa...

This paper considers the performance of a compensation mechanism that has received increasing attention in recent experimental literature. Our purpose is two-fold: (i) to characterize endogenous payments that can induce (mutual) cooperation in prisoner’s dilemma in the absence of social preferences; (ii) using models of quasi-maximin and inequality-aversion preferences to evaluate the possibili...