Biological market theory is potentially useful for understanding helping behaviour in animal societies. It predicts that competition for trading partners will affect the value of commodities exchanged. It has gained empirical support in cooperative breeders, where subordinates help dominant breeders in exchange for group membership, but so far without considering one crucial aspect: outside opt...

The 4-H program has the largest membership of any youth organization in the United States (Ohio Cooperative Extension Service, 1986). The mission of 4-H is to provide educational experiences for boys and girls, 9 to 19 years of age, to improve their quality of life. The 4-H program provides practical learning experiences for nearly five million youth each year (Ohio Cooperative Extension Servic...

We introduce an efficient and dynamic resource allocation mechanism within the framework of a cooperative game with fuzzy coalitions. A fuzzy coalition in a resource allocation problem can be so defined that membership grades of the players in it, are proportional to the fractions of their total resources. We call any distribution of the resources possessed by the players, among a prescribed nu...

Both the Cooperative Computing research group at NTT and the Theory of Distributed Systems research group at MIT are carrying out research on theoretical foundations of distributed computing, with a focus on cooperative group activities in networks. Such group activities range from human social activities in cyber communities to powerful distributed applications involving data sharing and coope...

We characterize how just-selfish workers are incompatible with long-run success in workers’ cooperatives. Emphasizing mutual monitoring as key to cooperatives’ organization design to combat “shirking” we discuss what possible mixes of behavioral types in the membership of a cooperative are compatible with sustainable success. Sustainability depends on social preferences and cooperative norms th...