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PROJECT PAGE for Isler, O., Gächter, S., Maule, A.J., Starmer, C., 2021. Contextualised strong reciprocity explains selfless cooperation despite selfish intuitions and weak social heuristics. Scientific Reports 11, 13868. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-93412-4 ABSTRACT: Humans frequently cooperate for collective benefit, even in one-shot social dilemmas. This provides a challenge for theories of cooperation. Two views focus on intuitions but offer conflicting explanations. The Social Heuristics Hypothesis argues that people with selfish preferences rely on cooperative intuitions and predicts that deliberation reduces cooperation. The Self-Control Account emphasizes control over selfish intuitions and is consistent with strong reciprocity—a preference for conditional cooperation in one-shot dilemmas. Here, we reconcile these explanations with each other as well as with strong reciprocity. We study one-shot cooperation across two main dilemma contexts, provision and maintenance, and show that cooperation is higher in provision than maintenance. Using time-limit manipulations, we experimentally study the cognitive processes underlying this robust result. Supporting the Self-Control Account, people are intuitively selfish in maintenance, with deliberation increasing cooperation. In contrast, consistent with the Social Heuristics Hypothesis, deliberation tends to increase the likelihood of free-riding in provision. Contextual differences between maintenance and provision are observed across additional measures: reaction time patterns of cooperation; social dilemma understanding; perceptions of social appropriateness; beliefs about others’ cooperation; and cooperation preferences. Despite these dilemma-specific asymmetries, we show that preferences, coupled with beliefs, successfully predict the high levels of cooperation in both maintenance and provision dilemmas. While the effects of intuitions are context-dependent and small, the widespread preference for strong reciprocity is the primary driver of one-shot cooperation. We advance the Contextualised Strong Reciprocity account as a unifying framework and consider its implications for research and policy.

Religions promote cooperation, but they can also be divisive. Is religious cooperation intuitively parochial against atheists? Evidence supporting the social heuristics hypothesis (SHH) suggests that cooperation is intuitive, independent of religious group identity. We tested this prediction in a one-shot prisoner’s dilemma game, where 1,280 practising Christian believers were paired with either a coreligionist or an atheist and where time limits were used to increase reliance on either intuitive or deliberated decisions. We explored another dual-process account of cooperation, the self-control account (SCA), which suggests that visceral reactions tend to be selfish and that cooperation requires deliberation. We found evidence for religious parochialism but no support for SHH’s prediction of intuitive cooperation. Consistent with SCA but requiring confirmation in future studies, exploratory analyses showed that religious parochialism involves decision conflict and concern for strong reciprocity and that deliberation promotes cooperation independent of religious group identity. The Stage 1 protocol for this Registered Report was accepted in principle on 28 January 2020. The protocol, as accepted by the journal, can be found at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12086781.v1 . In this Registered Report, Isler et al. test whether religious cooperation is intuitively parochial. They find evidence of religious parochialism but not intuitive cooperation. Exploratory analyses suggest that deliberation tends to promote cooperation in general.

In this study, to reduce the occurrence of risks and risk accidents in the construction stages of engineering projects and strengthen the risk management abilities of the subjects of such projects, prospect theory is introduced into an evolutionary game to construct a risk management behavior game model between owners and contractors in the construction stage. In addition, a government penalty parameter is introduced based on strong reciprocity theory. The intrinsic laws and optimal evolutionary stability strategy in the behavior evolution game between the two parties are analyzed. The influences of different parameter changes on the evolution results are simulated. The study shows that the game model has five local equilibrium points, and that positive risk management for both parties is a stable evolutionary strategy. The factors influencing the evolution results include the cost of positive risk management, risk perception loss and its share ratio, risk perception loss discount coefficient, and negative penalty coefficient. The differences in risk perceptions and effect of prospect theory hinder the behaviors of both parties from evolving towards the optimal strategy. By means of a negative penalty, a strong reciprocal government strategy can effectively coordinate the risk behavior strategies of both parties. Based on the analysis, suggestions are proposed for strengthening the effective management of risks in the construction stages of engineering projects.

The following chapter analyzes human behavior in the economy. What motivates people, what goals do they pursue and what makes them happy? We need the insights gained to explain unethical behavior and to move people to ethical behavior.

Economic experiments have suggested that cooperative humans will altruistically match local levels of cooperation (conditional cooperation) and pay to punish non-cooperators (altruistic punishment). Evolutionary models have suggested that if altruists punish non-altruists this could favour the evolution of costly helping behaviours (cooperation) among strangers. An often-key requirement is that helping behaviours and punishing behaviours form one single conjoined trait (strong reciprocity). Previous economics experiments have provided support for the hypothesis that punishment and cooperation form one conjoined, altruistically motivated, trait. However, such a conjoined trait may be evolutionarily unstable, and previous experiments have confounded a fear of being punished with being surrounded by cooperators, two factors that could favour cooperation. Here, we experimentally decouple the fear of punishment from a cooperative environment and allow cooperation and punishment behaviour to freely separate (420 participants). We show, that if a minority of individuals is made immune to punishment, they (i) learn to stop cooperating on average despite being surrounded by high levels of cooperation, contradicting the idea of conditional cooperation and (ii) often continue to punish, ‘hypocritically’, showing that cooperation and punishment do not form one, altruistically motivated, linked trait.

Vehicle dashboard cameras or dashcams, among other smart vehicle technologies, are increasingly attracting interest across the globe. Furthermore, dashcam videos as objective witnesses are often shared to resolve various traffic incidents. In this work, we aim to understand cross-national differences in motives and privacy concerns of dashcam video-sharing, which are closely related to the factors that vary across countries, such as cultural values, traffic regulation, driving environments, and privacy perception. Toward this goal, we conduct a cross-national survey study with three countries with high dashcam adoption rates, i.e., China, Korea, and Russia. The survey results from these countries consistently revealed two major motives for sharing dashcam data: (1) reciprocal altruism and social justice, and (2) monetary reward. Respondents from all three countries felt more strongly towards reciprocal altruism and social justice and less towards monetary rewards. Regarding privacy concerns, however, the surveys presented discrepancies among these countries, indicating stronger cross-national influences on sharing concerns than on sharing motives. Cross-national differences in privacy concerns and their relationship with motives were nuanced and context-dependent.

Experimental implementations of dictator games are found to differ in terms of their underlying strategic incentives. We explore this discovery in two separate directions. Theoretically, assuming identical other-regarding preferences, we show that the two most widely used protocols can generate strongly contrasting rational-choice predictions, from which different interpretations of dictator giving arise. Experimentally, a tailor-made experiment reveals significant differences between the two protocols but rejects full rationality as a satisfactory explanatory theory. Our findings indicate that several previously drawn conclusions regarding other-regarding preferences among humans distinguished by social class, gender, generation, nationality, etc. may be more ambiguous than hitherto believed. ISSN:0899-8256

Humans often behave altruistically towards strangers with no chance of reciprocation. From an evolutionary perspective, this is puzzling. The evolution of altruistic cooperative behavior—in which an organism’s action reduces its fitness and increases the fitness of another organism (e.g. by sharing food)—only makes sense when it is directed at genetically related organisms (kin selection) or when one can expect the favor to be returned (reciprocal altruism). Therefore, evolutionary theorists such as Sober and Wilson have argued that we should revise Neo-Darwininian evolutionary theory. They argue that human altruism evolved through group selection in which groups of altruists were naturally selected because they had a comparative advantage over other groups. Wilson and Sober’s hypothesis attracted followers but is rejected by most of their peers. The heated debate between advocates and critics of group selection often suffers from a lack of conceptual clarity. In response, I set out to clearly distinguish ‘genetic’ from ‘cultural’ group selection (developed by Boyd, Richerson & Henrich) and argue that the latter does not face the potentially debilitating problems plaguing the former. I defend the claim that human altruistic dispositions evolved through cultural group selection and gene-culture coevolution and offer empirical evidence in support. I also argue that actual altruistic behavior often goes beyond the kind of behavior humans have evolved to display. Conscious and voluntary reasoning processes, I show, have an important role in altruistic behavior. This is often overlooked in the scientific literature on human altruism.

Rational Choice Theory has made crucial contributions for the study of social phenomena. However, the utilization of false or too simple assumptions supposes an important limitation in this sense. This paper begins with a refusal of the common adoption of a motivationally monist point of view in which self-interest is the only motivation capable of explaining social action. In this paper, first, I offer a general overview of the most important kinds of human motivation identified by the specialized literature. Then, I focus on the quantitatively most important one: strong reciprocity. The paper finishes with a discussion about the possibility of incorporating plural motivations in formal models., La teoría de la elección racional ha realizado aportaciones decisivas para el estudio de los fenómenos sociales. No obstante, el uso de supuestos falsos o excesivamente incompletos supone un importante lastre en este sentido. El presente trabajo parte del rechazo a la adopción rutinaria de un punto de vista monista motivacional, según el cual el egoísmo es el único tipo de supuesto motivacional capaz de dar cuenta de la acción social. En estas páginas se trata, primero, de esbozar una panorámica general de los tipos de motivación humana más importantes identificados por la bibliografía especializada, para, posteriormente, centrarse específicamente en el cuantitativamente más importante de todos ellos, la reciprocidad fuerte. El trabajo concluye con una discusión sobre la posibilidad de incluir una pluralidad de motivaciones en los modelos formales.

Although past research has convincingly shown that rewarding prosocial individuals helps to establish high levels of cooperation, research investigating factors that promote rewarding others has been surprisingly rare. The present research addresses this gap and examines two factors that were shown in past research to play a role in prosocial behaviour. In a well-powered study (total N = 1003), we tested the impact of (a) a basic prosocial personality trait (the Honesty-Humility dimension from the HEXACO personality model) and (b) intuitive decision-making, as well as (c) their interaction, in rewarding prosocial individuals. We found that (1) intuition promotes rewarding prosocial others; (2) Honesty-Humility was not significantly related to rewarding prosocial others; and (3) that Honesty-Humility did not significantly moderate the effect of intuition on reward. Implications for the understanding of reciprocating others’ prosocial behaviour are discussed.

The issue of which factors influence the success or failure of crowdfunding projects is a critical topic, as it can bring founders sufficient financial support to realise their ideal innovation. We...

Understanding the social dynamics in human-robot cooperation stands to broaden our understanding of human behaviour in general, as well as to improve the design of robots designated for certain social tasks. This study investigated human cooperative behaviours in the context of prisoner’s dilemma (PD) games and the extent to which people’s willingness to cooperate with a robot varies according to incentives provided by the game context. We manipulated the payoff matrices of human-robot PD games and predicted that people would cooperate more often in the situation where cooperating with the robot was a relatively more rewarding option. Although the pre-registered mixed effect logistic regression model showed no significant effect of incentive structure on human decisions in the iterated PD games overall, further exploratory analyses revealed that in early game rounds, participants made significantly more cooperative decisions when the game structure provided more incentives for cooperation. However, subsequent game decisions were dominantly driven by other two factors. The first was the robot’s previous game choices, where participants played a tit-for-tat strategy against the robot even though its decisions were random. Second, presentation of real-time game scores significantly impacted people’s cooperative tendencies. Participants only showed prosocial tendencies toward the robot when they had achieved high scores themselves. Our findings on the initial effects of incentive structure, robust reciprocity, and conditional prosociality in human-robot cooperation highlight ways in which we might expect social behaviour toward robots to differ from social behaviour toward humans, and help to establish the foundations necessary to support successful social collaboration with robots.

It is a challenge to understand why cooperation is prevalent in human society, especially without a mechanism that benefits cooperators such as direct, indirect and strong reciprocity. We study an evolutionary process of public goods game among individuals in multiple groups in a population. We find that the existence of an independent cooperator group is beneficial to the rise of cooperation in the population, which is applicable to both Moran process and a so-called disaster update process proposed in this paper. However, the introduction of mutation can completely overturn the emerging trend of cooperation, and even let the defectors occupy the whole population for a short period of time, by continuously reducing the number of cooperator groups. In addition, the migration of individuals between groups can also inhibit cooperation. More specifically, a higher frequency of migration can reduce the probability of cooperators occupying the population, and extend the time it takes for the population to reach the stationary state. Furthermore, we find that a special kind of multi-individual migration, namely group division, can resist the anti-cooperation effect of mutation to some extent, mainly by maintaining a certain number of cooperator groups in the population. The aforementioned results suggest that cooperation can rise without strengthening the ability of cooperators to directly confront the defectors in a population composed of multiple groups.

In social networks, individual abilities to establish interactions are always heterogeneous and independent of the number of topological neighbors. We here study the influence of heterogeneous distributions of abilities on the evolution of individual cooperation in the spatial prisoner’s dilemma game. First, we introduced a prisoner’s dilemma game, taking into account individual heterogeneous abilities to establish games, which are determined by the owned game resources. Second, we studied three types of game resource distributions that follow the power-law property. Simulation results show that the heterogeneous distribution of individual game resources can promote cooperation effectively, and the heterogeneous level of resource distributions has a positive influence on the maintenance of cooperation. Extensive analysis shows that cooperators with large resource capacities can foster cooperator clusters around themselves. Furthermore, when the temptation to defect is high, cooperator clusters in which the central pure cooperators have larger game resource capacities are more stable than other cooperator clusters.

Voluntary participation, as a simple yet valid mechanism to promote cooperation in game theory, has been received a great deal of attention. Besides, historical payoff has also been verified to be an efficient way of promoting cooperation. Inspired by these facts, here we introduce historical payoff into the measure of fitness in voluntary prisoner's dilemma. In detail, the contribution of historical payoff is decided by the tunable parameter w: when w equals to zero, the traditional voluntary prisoner's dilemma game returns, where no historical payoff is contained; while positive w involves the impact of historical payoff. It is shown that cooperative behavior is remarkably promoted with increment of w for small b; while for large b, system will show the cycle dominance of these strategies and avoid the dominance of defection. This indicates that historical payoff has a positive impact on the evolution of cooperation.

Traditional replication dynamic model and the corresponding concept of evolutionary stable strategy (ESS) only takes into account whether the system can return to the equilibrium after being subjected to a small disturbance. In the real world, due to continuous noise, the ESS of the system may not be stochastically stable. In this paper, a model of voluntary public goods game with punishment is studied in a stochastic situation. Unlike the existing model, we describe the evolutionary process of strategies in the population as a generalized quasi-birth-and-death process. And we investigate the stochastic stable equilibrium (SSE) instead. By numerical experiments, we get all possible SSEs of the system for any combination of parameters, and investigate the influence of parameters on the probabilities of the system to select different equilibriums. It is found that in the stochastic situation, the introduction of the punishment and non-participation strategies can change the evolutionary dynamics of the system and equilibrium of the game. There is a large range of parameters that the system selects the cooperative states as its SSE with a high probability. This result provides us an insight and control method for the evolution of cooperation in the public goods game in stochastic situations.

Reputation can promote cooperation in public goods game and player's cooperative behavior is not pure economical rationality, but habituation would influence their behaviors as well. One's habituation can be formed by repeated behaviors in daily life and be affected by habitual preference. We aim to investigate the sustainable cooperation based on reputation and habit formation. To better investigate the impacts of reputation and habitual preference on the evolution and sustainability of cooperation. We introduce three types of agents into our spatial public goods game. Through numerical simulations, we find that the larger habitual preference make cooperation easier to emerge and maintain. Additionally, we find that a moderate number of agents who want to obtain more reputation (ICs) are best for the sustainability of cooperation. Finally, we observe that the variation of donations of ICs can influence greatly on the equilibrium of public goods game. When ICs reduce their donations, a proper contribution will be better to maintain the cooperative behaviors.

Network reciprocity is one of the key mechanisms to solve social dilemmas, and has attracted many researchers for the last decade. Here, we explore what happens if network reciprocity is dovetailed with indirect reciprocity. This is motivated by the idea that a player may utilize observed information to evaluate his neighbors. Simulations based on our minimal model reveal that adding indirect reciprocity does not always increase the level of cooperation beyond the level of model without indirect reciprocity. This implies that the combination of two different reciprocity mechanisms, each enhancing cooperation if applied independently, can lead negative interference effect on cooperation. The details of this depend on type of action assessment system determining what is good and bad. Interestingly, we found that a high level of information is not always superior to low levels of information.

In the canonical framework of evolutionary 22 games, a binary strategy set comprising cooperation (C) and defection (D) has usually been presumed. Inspired by commonly observed real-world facts, we explore what happens if the resolution of strategy increases. As an extreme limit, the infinite resolution case is both a continuous and a mixed strategy defined by a real number in the range of [0,1]. We find that increasing resolution amplifies cooperation in spatial prisoner's dilemma games as compared with the binary strategy definition; however, this enhancement tendency with increasing resolution is not monotonic in the case of a mixed-strategy setting.

Extensive cooperation among unrelated individuals is unique to humans, who often sacrifice personal benefits for the common good and work together to achieve what they are unable to execute alone. The evolutionary success of our species is indeed due, to a large degree, to our unparalleled other-regarding abilities. Yet, a comprehensive understanding of human cooperation remains a formidable challenge. Recent research in social science indicates that it is important to focus on the collective behavior that emerges as the result of the interactions among individuals, groups, and even societies. Non-equilibrium statistical physics, in particular Monte Carlo methods and the theory of collective behavior of interacting particles near phase transition points, has proven to be very valuable for understanding counterintuitive evolutionary outcomes. By studying models of human cooperation as classical spin models, a physicist can draw on familiar settings from statistical physics. However, unlike pairwise interactions among particles that typically govern solid-state physics systems, interactions among humans often involve group interactions, and they also involve a larger number of possible states even for the most simplified description of reality. The complexity of solutions therefore often surpasses that observed in physical systems. Here we review experimental and theoretical research that advances our understanding of human cooperation, focusing on spatial pattern formation, on the spatiotemporal dynamics of observed solutions, and on self-organization that may either promote or hinder socially favorable states., 48 two-column pages, 35 figures; Review accepted for publication in Physics Reports

Recent experiments have revealed fine structure in cortical microcircuitry. In particular, bidirectional connections are more prevalent than expected by chance. Whether this fine structure affects cortical dynamics and function has not yet been studied. Here we investigate the effects of excess bidirectionality in a strongly recurrent network model of rodent V1. We show that reciprocal connections have only a very weak effect on orientation selectivity. We find that excess reciprocity between inhibitory neurons slows down the dynamics and strongly increases the Fano factor, while for reciprocal connections between excitatory and inhibitory neurons it has the opposite effect. In contrast, excess bidirectionality within the excitatory population has a minor effect on the neuronal dynamics. These results can be explained by an effective delayed neuronal self-coupling which stems from the fine structure. Our work suggests that excess bidirectionality between inhibitory neurons decreases the efficiency of feature encoding in cortex by reducing the signal to noise ratio. On the other hand it implies that the experimentally observed strong reciprocity between excitatory and inhibitory neurons improves the feature encoding.

We theoretically study the effect of a third person enforcement on a one-shot prisoner’s dilemma game played by two persons, with whom the third person plays repeated prisoner’s dilemma games. We find that the possibility of the third person’s future punishment causes them to cooperate in the one-shot game.

This paper designs a reciprocity measurement system for atmospheric channel for the first time in China. The mean of reciprocity is higher than 0.8, which proves that the atmospheric channel has strong reciprocity. The research in this paper provides a parameter reference for adaptive optics system design.

Group-wise cooperation, or cooperation among three or more individuals, is an integral part of human societies. It is likely that group-wise cooperation also played a crucial role in the survival of early hominins, who were confronted with novel environmental challenges, long before the emergence of Homo sapiens. However, previous theoretical and empirical studies, focusing mainly on modern humans, have tended to suggest that evolution of cooperation in sizable groups cannot be explained by simple direct reciprocity and requires some additional mechanisms (reputation, punishment, etc.), which are cognitively too demanding for early hominins. As a partial resolution of the paradox, our recent analysis of a stochastic evolutionary model, which considers the effect of random drift, has revealed that evolution of group-wise cooperation is more likely to occur in larger groups when an individual's share of the benefit produced by one cooperator does not decrease with increasing group size (i.e., goods are non-rivalrous). In this paper, we further extend our previous analysis to explore possible consequences of introducing rare mistakes in behavior or imperfect information about behavior of others on the model outcome. Analyses of the extended models show that evolution of group-wise cooperation can be facilitated by large group size even when individuals intending to cooperate sometimes fail to do so or when all the information about the past behavior of group members is not available. We argue, therefore, that evolution of cooperation in sizable groups does not necessarily require other mechanisms than direct reciprocity if the goods to be produced via group-wise cooperation are non-rivalrous.

Introduce an agent based model for computing trust and cooperation level.Comparison of cooperation level in different social trust environments.Address the way in which the level of trust in cooperative relations depends on the network structures.We want to see if the coexistence of the trust update rules, in association with co-evolution game, changes the overall cooperative level.Introduce a model of two interconnected networks where a strong network can promotes the cooperation in weak network. This study investigates how the user's exchanges affect people's trust in electronic commerce and empower them to interact with foreign customers. Online exchanges often occur between strangers who cannot rely on past behavior or the prospect of future interactions to establish mutual trust. Game theorists have formalized this problem as a prisoner's dilemma and predict mutual noncooperation. In this paper, we introduce a social network based model to promote the cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma game. For this study, we implemented an agent-based simulation framework, which models different types of behaviors in online auctions. Agents who represent buyers or sellers are located in the nodes of a small world graph. Each link weight between the agent and its neighbor symbolizes how much it trusts this neighbor. A link with trust inferior to some cut-link threshold will be removed from the graph. Our results show that the evolved structure of the graph induces considerable variation in the level of cooperation and the profit in the e-commerce system. This shows that the outcome of our co-evolutionary game, in terms of cooperative behavior, strongly depends on topology but also on the update rule used in the trust between users. Co-evolution of game dynamics in interconnected networks is also studied, where two networks are interconnected, and players have interactions not only with others in the same network, but also with players in the other network. We will demonstrate that the interdependence between networks promotes the cooperation in both networks. But, the degree of promotion changes as a function of interdependence degree.

In repeated games, it is hard to distinguish true prosocial behavior from strategic behavior. In particular, a player does not know whether a reciprocal action is intrinsically or strategically motivated. In this paper, we experimentally investigate the relationship between intrinsic and strategic reciprocity by running a two-period repeated trust game. In the “strategic treatment” the subjects know that they will meet twice, while in the “non-strategic treatment” they do not know and hence the second period comes as a surprise. We find that subjects anticipate strategic reciprocity, and that intrinsic reciprocity is rewarded. In fact, the total level of cooperation, in which trust is reciprocated, is higher in the non-strategic treatment. This indicates that strategic reciprocity crowds out intrinsic reciprocity: If one takes the repeated game incentives out of the repeated game, one sees more cooperation and higher social surplus.

Economists often rely on the Berg et al. (1995) trust game, or variants thereof, to identify levels of trust and reciprocity, which are fundamental to discussions of social capital. But to what extent is behavior in this game sensitive to the way the instructions are framed? We use the Berg et al. trust game played for ten rounds with random re-matching to study this. We implement a number of variations in the way the game is presented to subjects. We show that levels of trust, reciprocity and returns to trust are significantly higher under “goal framing”, which highlights the conflict inherent in the game, between self-interest and maximizing social surplus. Furthermore, with such framing, trust measured via the experimental game exhibits significant positive correlation with trust measured via the Social Values Orientation questionnaire.

Understanding the emergence and maintenance of cooperative behaviors represents one of the most interesting challenges in natural and social science. A great number of studies have investigated this question via spatial reciprocity, namely, players are put on networks and obtain their payoffs by playing the game with their neighbors. It has also been verified that in networked population spatial heterogeneity and coevolution setup promote cooperation theoretically and empirically. Inspired by this well-known fact, we consider a coevolution mechanism: players not only adopts the strategy of his opponent, but also learn his opponent's ability. We find a more interesting and counterintuitive phenomenon: compared with the heterogeneity scenario, this coevolution setup does not promote the cooperation in spatial prisoner's dilemma game. With regard to this observation, we unveil that it is related with the range of distribution of individuals' ability. The coevolution setup finally makes the individual's ability shrink towards a single value. To explore the generality of this finding, we have testified on different types of topology structure.

A public database is a special kind of public goods in which data quality control involves solving some basic problems in public management science at the interface with data science. A public database network is a complex body with some physical objects associated with each other (a visible system) and some partners of the public data game (an invisible system); the quality of public data is reflected synthetically by the database technology and evolution of the public data game. From the viewpoint of public goods management, the availability of data in public databases depends on the cooperation evolution of the public data game for same data cleansing technology. The Chinese public data network is regarded as a scale-free complex network on which the corresponding data game is an evolutionary game. Using the models of a prisoners dilemma game and extended prisoners dilemma game, the existence of an evolutionary stable strategy is discussed for the public data game. With the theoretical modeling of complex network analysis, it is further regarded that the collaborators of the public data evolution game would survive on the scale-free complex network, and that cooperative strategy even becomes a stable strategy of the public data evolutionary game through strong punishment or by returning all fines to the punisher. The corruption sub-game model of the public data evolutionary game is established to analyze the influence of the punishers corruption. By constructing the corruption sub-game model, the rights of the data auditor are beneficial for cooperative behavior to survive, and when the stronger rights of the auditor would result in total corruption. Finally, we discuss the extent to which information disclosure and freedom of media help to limit the rights of the public auditor, while helping the cooperator and loyal punisher to irrupt, such that the cooperators survival increases to improve the data quality in public databases.

This paper presents a selective review of decades of empirical research on behavioral games, with a particular focus on experimental games. We suggest that games effectively (but imperfectly) model many human social interactions, and we present important findings from six popular experimental games – Prisoner’s and Social Dilemmas, and the Trust, Ultimatum, Dictator, and Deception games – to discuss their theoretical and empirical implications as well as their various insights into human nature. We close by asking several fundamental questions about games and suggesting several directions and ideas for future research.

In this paper we study a generalized variation of the replicator dynamic that involves several species and sub-species that may interact. We show how this dynamic comes about from a specific finite-population model, but also show that one must take into consideration the dynamic nature of the population sizes (and hence proportions) in order to make the model complete. We provide expressions for these population dynamics to produce a kind of multi-replicator dynamic. We then use this replicator dynamic to show that cooperation can emerge as a stable behavior when two species each play prisoner’s dilemma as their intra-species game and a form of zero-sum predator prey game as their inter-species game. General necessary and sufficient conditions for cooperation to emerge as stable are provided for a number of game classes. We also showed an example using Hawk–Dove where both species can converge to stable (asymmetric) mixed strategies.

The preferential reference selection is a new research direction in the evolutionary game theory which provides a paradigmatic framework to study the evolution of cooperation. This paper presents a new reference selection model called self-adaptive win-stay-lose-shift (WSLS) mechanism for strategy updating. Within the proposed reference selection mechanism, the reference model is determined by a self-adaptive way that each individual retains its reference if the receiving payoff does not decline, otherwise switches the reference by randomly selecting a new one from its remaining neighbors. Two social dilemma models, the prisoner's dilemma game (PDG) and public good game (PGG), are utilized to simulate the interactions among individuals and verify the effectiveness of the presented mechanism on square lattices. The simulation results demonstrate that this simple mechanism can evidently increase the cooperation level, which reveals a new means to promote the emergence of cooperation.

A linear public good experiment adopted from Holt and Laury [1997. Classroom games: Voluntary provision of a public good. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 11(4), 209–215.] has been employed to investigate strategic behaviour in pollution abatement among African climate decision-makers. The experiment consisted of three groups, of which groups 2 and 3 received one and two treatments, respectively. The first treatment entailed publicly disclosing the pollution of each member of a group by placing a corresponding colour-coded card in front of each subject, while the second involved the withdrawal of the public disclosure. Group 2 received the first treatment; Group 3 received both the first and second treatments in succession. We found that the untreated group (baseline) polluted more than the two treated groups, and there was no statistically significant difference between the pollution abatement of the two treated groups. These results suggest that public disclosure potentially drives pollution abatement ...

How to exploit public non-renewable resources is a public goods dilemma. Individuals can choose to limit the depletion in order to use the resource for a longer time or consume more goods to benefit themselves. When the resource is used up, there is no benefit for the future generations any more, thus the evolutionary process ends. Here we investigate what mechanisms can extend the use of resources in the framework of evolutionary game theory under two updating rules based on imitation and aspiration, respectively. Compared with imitation process, aspiration dynamics may prolong the sustainable time of a public resource.

A proper function of an entity is a beneficial effect that helps explain the persistence of the entity. Proper functions thereby arise through feedback mechanisms with beneficial effects as inputs and persistence as outputs. We continue to make assertions because they benefit speakers by benefiting speakers. Hearers benefit from true information. Speakers benefit by influencing hearer belief. If hearers do not benefit, they will not form beliefs in response to assertions. Speakers can then only maintain influence by providing true information, often enough. The function of assertion is then inducing true hearer belief. When interests conflict, however, some mechanism must ensure that speakers provide true information often enough, instead of deceiving, or providing information regardless of quality. In humans, a core mechanism stabilizing true assertion involves social norms for truth telling. We tell the truth partly because we prescribe and enforce telling the truth.

Patience—low delay discounting—has been shown to predict cooperative behavior in environments where cooperation conflicts with competitive aspirations. Indeed, impatience seems to be associated to a greater concern for the latter (i.e., for the individual’s relative standing). But what about intergroup-competition situations, where competitive sentiments against outgroups can trigger ingroup cooperation? We analyze the connection between delay discounting and performance in two problem-solving tasks with either individual or intergroup-competition incentives. We find a positive relationship between the mean patience of the members of a group (both when using long-term discounting and short-term discounting, also known as present bias) and the within-group cooperative synergy during intergroup competition. Further exploratory analyses based on a follow-up social preferences task suggest that, for long-term discounting, this result may be explained by patient (vs. impatient) individuals’ propensity to be initially cooperative and to subsequently treat group members based on reciprocal fairness instead of strict equality. For short-term discounting, or present bias, our exploratory analyses do not yield any significant result, meaning that we are unable to provide a social-preferences-based explanation to the higher synergy observed in groups with less present biased individuals.

Culture is a central concept broadly studied in social anthropology and sociology. It has been gaining increasing attention in economics, appearing in research on labor market discrimination, identity, gender, and social preferences. Most experimental economics research on culture studies cross-national or cross-ethnic differences in economic behavior. In contrast, we explain laboratory behavior using two cultural dimensions adopted from a prominent general cultural framework in contemporary social anthropology: group commitment and grid control. Groupness measures the extent to which individual identity is incorporated into group or collective identity; gridness measures the extent to which social and political prescriptions intrinsically influence individual behavior. Grid-group characteristics are measured for each individual using selected items from the World Values Survey. We hypothesize that these attributes allow us to systematically predict behavior in a way that discriminates among multiple forms of social preferences using a simple, parsimonious deductive model. The theoretical predictions are further tested in the economics laboratory by applying them to the dictator, ultimatum, and trust games. We find that these predictions are confirmed overall for most experimental games, although the strength of empirical support varies across games. We conclude that grid-group cultural theory is a viable predictor of people’s economic behavior, then discuss potential limitations of the current approach and ways to improve it.

The prisoner's dilemma game is a simple model to understand the evolution of cooperation in complex systems. In this work, we introduce the element of noise to the payoffs of the spatial prisoner's dilemma game and study its effects on the evolution of cooperations. A tunable parameter, termed as the noise strength (α), is introduced into the model to mimic the effects of noise in the individual fitness calculation. Our modified model remarkably promotes the behavior of cooperation, which may help us to better understand the emergence of cooperation in natural, social and economical systems.

Both in the field and in the lab, participants frequently cooperate, despite the fact that the situation can be modelled as a simultaneous, symmetric prisoner’s dilemma. This experiment manipulates the payoff in case both players defect, and explains the degree of cooperation by a combination of five motives: the size of gains from cooperation, expectations about cooperativeness in the population in question, the degree of risk and loss aversion, and the degree by which a participant is averse to inequity. Information about these motivational forces stems from additional within subjects tests. All five factors are significant only if one controls for all the other motives, which suggests that a prisoner’s dilemma is a game jointly characterised by these five motives. The need to control for the remaining explanations seems to be the reason why earlier attempts at explaining choices in the prisoner’s dilemma with personality have not been successful.

This study explores the impact of government intervention on the evolution of cooperation using a popular framework for understanding cooperative behavior (the public goods game). Agents either contribute to the production of a shared public good or free-ride on the efforts of others. This game traditionally results in mass free-riding (a sub-optimal outcome), in which case a government can intercede by levying taxes and providing the public good to increase welfare. Is this still the case when looking at an evolutionary framework with natural selection? Theoretical results suggest that the government “levels the playing field”, allowing cooperative and uncooperative behavior to coexist longer than it ordinarily would, but it cannot change the course of evolution.

The present study analyzes how attractiveness affects social norm enforcement in a context of third-party punishment and reward. The authors developed a Third-Party Punishment and Reward Game (TPRG) that consisted of two steps. First, subjects observed a short Public Goods Game between two fictitious players; afterwards they had the opportunity to punish or reward either one or both players. Interfering in the game was costly for the subjects. The eight rounds of the game comprised scenarios that were either stereotype-consistent (attractive cooperators and unattractive free-riders) or stereotype-inconsistent (attractive free-riders and unattractive cooperators). Subjects' emotional responses to each fictitious player were registered. Participants (N = 197) were found to punish attractive free-riders less severely than unattractive ones, whereas attractive cooperators were rewarded more than unattractive ones. Our present findings may support a so-called “beauty priority”: attractiveness was highly valued by participants even among players who cheated. Furthermore, the intensity of subjects' emotional responses reflected the amounts of punishment and reward they allocated to players. The above results led to the conclusion that stereotype-consistent scenarios evoke more extreme emotions and interventions than stereotype-inconsistent ones.

Reciprocity is an important factor in human-human interaction, so it can be expected that it should also play a major role in human-robot interaction (HRI). Participants in our study played the Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma Game (RPDG) and the mini Ultimatum Game (mUG) with robot and human agents, with the agents using either Tit for Tat (TfT) or Random strategies. As part of the study we also measured the perceived personality traits in the agents using the TIPI test after every round of RPDG and mUG. The results show that the participants collaborated more with humans than with a robot, however they tended to be equally reciprocal with both agents. The experiment also showed the TfT strategy as the most profitable strategy; affecting collaboration, reciprocation, profit and joint profit in the game. Most of the participants tended to be fairer with the human agent in mUG. Furthermore, robots were perceived as less open and agreeable than humans. Consciousness, extroversion and emotional stability were perceived roughly the same in humans and robots. TfT strategy became associated with an extroverted and agreeable personality in the agents. We could observe that the norm of reciprocity applied in HRI has potential implications for robot design.

We provide an experimental investigation of the fair rule preference and its effect on anonymous cooperation, intending to test the hypothesis that people who exhibit high degrees of rule inequality aversion—consider “equality and mutual obligation under the social contract” as justified, are disgusted with free-rider behavior in the public goods game and are more likely to be conditional cooperators and make conditional contributions. Based on experimental work related to rule-preferences Chlas and Moffatt (Giving in dictator games: experimenter demand effect or preference over the rules of the game? (No. 2012, 044). Jena Economic Research Papers, 2012) and the public goods game Fischbacher et al. (Am Econ Rev 100(1):541–556, 2010), we designed a dictator game with the option of buying a veto (when the veto was purchased, the level of rule inequality decreased, making it an ultimatum game) to measure rule preference, i.e., rule inequality aversion, and conducted a two-stage public goods experiment to identify the cooperation preferences and repeated cooperation levels of participants. We investigated the relationship between rule preferences and cooperative preferences (conditional reciprocal preference) and tried to explain the adjustments people made when making repeated contributions of public goods (conditional cooperation behavior) from a rule preference perspective. The results show that: (1) Heterogeneous rule-inequality-aversion preferences are found in lab; (2) The stronger the rule-inequality-aversion preference is, the higher the probability is for the individual to become a conditional cooperator in public goods experiment; (3) Individuals who have stronger rule-inequality-aversion are more sensitive to the contributions that are deviated from the norm. Compared to the theory of conditional cooperation types, rule-inequality-aversion preference has a better explanation power when it comes to the behavior adjustment in repeated public goods contribution.

We built a new indirect reciprocity model based on binary image scores, where an agent’s strategy and norm co-evolve. The norm, meaning what behavior is evaluated as “good” or “bad,” stipulates how image scores of two agents playing a game is altered, which has been presumed to be a fixed value in most previous studies. Also, unlike former studies, our model allows an agent to play with an agent who has a different norm. This point of relaxing the freedom of the model pulls down cooperation level vis-a-vis the case where an agent always plays with another one having same norm. However, it is observed that a rather larger dilemma shows robust cooperation establishing compared with a smaller dilemma, since a norm that punishes a so-called second-order free-rider is prompted. To encourage the evolution of norms to be able to punish second-order free-riders, a society needs a small number of defectors. This is elucidated by the fact that cases with action error are more cooperative than those without action error.

Boycotts are among the most frequent forms of consumer expression against unethical or egregious acts by firms. Most current research explains consumers’ decisions to participate in a boycott using a universal cost-benefit model that mixes instrumental and expressive motives. To date, no conceptual framework accounts for the distinct behavioral motives for boycotting though. This article focuses on motivational heterogeneity among consumers. By distinguishing two stable behavioral models—a self-regarding type and a strongly reciprocal type—we introduce the notion of strong reciprocity to the boycott literature. We argue that the presence of strongly reciprocal consumers can enhance boycott success. First, in interactions with the target firm, strongly reciprocal consumers perceive higher levels of egregiousness and are more willing to engage in boycotting behavior, even in unfavorable strategic conditions, which provides a stable basis for boycotting. Second, in interactions with self-regarding consumers, strongly reciprocal consumers are willing to sanction those others, according to whether they participate in the boycott, which increases overall participation in and the likelihood of success of a consumer boycott. These findings have implications for further research, as well as for firms, nongovernmental organizations, and boycotters.