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Community currencies (CCs) are common social economy instruments for aligning market transactions with social commitments. They change incentives, encouraging trade within the CC network, but may also symbolize and thereby amplify users' commitment to social values of solidarity and cooperation. The behavioral effect of the second channel, moreover, is clouded by endogenous use of the CC: commitment encourages use, but does use also trigger commitment? We disentangle the direction of causality with a lab-in-the-field ultimatum game experiment, which confronts participants with a choice between more or less competitive responses. By exogenously varying the currency in which the game is played (CC or euros), we isolate the causal effect of the CC on behavior. Self-declared regular users of the currency are less competitive when playing in the CC than when playing in euros. This is not due to unobserved differences in the individuals, because when playing in euros, their behavior is the same as non-users'. Nor is it due to non-convertibility of the CC, as non-users' behavior is not affected by the currency. We therefore isolate the CC as a "trigger of cooperativeness" for those who have a base-level of commitment to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract We examine the generally accepted hypothesis that directed reciprocity is a powerful driver for cooperation. To do so, we consider a framework where agents situated on a circle network interact with their neighbors and have the choice to be egoistic, altruistic, or partially cooperative. We study the interaction between reciprocity, the likelihood that an agent reproduces value to the neighbor who has recently produced value for the agent, and inertia, the tendency of agents to repeat their previous choices even if other strategies are more successful. On the basis of extensive simulations, we conclude that for high levels of inertia, reciprocity enhances cooperation, while for low levels of inertia reciprocity rather subverts cooperation. For intermediate levels of inertia, we find a U-shaped effect. Reciprocity therefore interacts with the level of inertia in a non-monotonic fashion.

We examine the generally accepted hypothesis that directed reciprocity is a powerful driver for cooperation. To do so, we consider a framework where agents situated on a circle network interact with their neighbors and have the choice to be egoistic, altruistic, or partially cooperative. We study the interaction between reciprocity, the likelihood that an agent reproduces value to the neighbor who has recently produced value for the agent, and inertia, the tendency of agents to repeat their previous choices even if other strategies are more successful. On the basis of extensive simulations, we conclude that for high levels of inertia, reciprocity enhances cooperation, while for low levels of inertia reciprocity rather subverts cooperation. For intermediate levels of inertia, we find a U-shaped effect. Reciprocity therefore interacts with the level of inertia in a non-monotonic fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report the first record of mutual allogrooming in free-ranging wild northern red muntjac (Muntiacus vaginalis) from dense tropical forests of Similipal Tiger Reserve, Odisha, India. This observation is similar to reciprocal allogrooming behaviour between social partners, reported only in Impala (Aepyceros melampus) in free-ranging conditions. We video-recorded cooperative allogrooming between two female (one adult and another juvenile) northern red muntjacs. Behavioural quantification suggests that although both individuals exchanged equal numbers of grooming bouts, the adult female received a greater share of grooming time and episodes, respectively. The time spent on grooming as well as the number of tongue strokes delivered were found to be negatively correlated between the two individuals. The grooming pattern could possibly be attributed to kin selection and detailed work is required to understand this behaviour in this poorly-studied primitive deer. Our record indicates the possible existence of cooperative allogrooming in other ungulates of the Order Artiodactyla. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coordinated punishment occurs when punishment requires a specific number of punishers to be effective, otherwise, no damage will be inflicted on the target. While societies often rely on this punishment device, its benefits are unclear compared to uncoordinated punishment, where punishment decisions are substitutes. In this paper, we compare the efficacy of coordinated and uncoordinated punishment in a team investment game with two investors and one allocator. Our findings indicate that coordinated punishment results in higher levels of cooperation and reciprocity, as measured by the levels of joint investment and the return by allocators. Importantly, this does not translate into higher payoffs: investors use punishment more frequently when this is coordinated, which destroys the efficiency gains generated by the highest investment. In fact, our results suggest that the highest level of efficiency would be achieved if investors were not allowed to punish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the growing interest in leadership in the experimental literature, theoretical analyses of leadership have received relatively limited attention. This study investigates the effectiveness of leading by example in public goods games among reciprocal agents. The "leading-by-example" game (LBE) is a two-stage game with the same payoff structure as the classic voluntary contribution mechanism (VCM), in which a leader first makes a contribution decision, followed by the followers who make a contribution decision upon observing the leader's move. If the marginal per capita return (MPCR) is sufficiently high, LBE is more effective than VCM at inducing contributions. However, if MPCR is low, VCM is more effective than LBE. An experimental test of the comparative statics is conducted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose and test a model of loyalty in games. Players can mutually maintain loyalty by working towards a common goal that is pareto-superior to any Nash equilibrium without it. Loyalty imposes a psychological cost on defecting in an ongoing cooperation, which is thus sustained. We distinguish loyalty from reciprocity and explain how it complements guilt aversion with two dynamic games from a field experiment conducted in a Pakistani factory. The evidence supports the validity of loyalty, which has a stronger effect within than between groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans evolved to be hyper-cooperative, particularly when among people who are well known to them, when relationships involve reciprocal helping opportunities, and when the costs to the helper are substantially less than the benefits to the recipient. Because humans' cooperative nature evolved over many millennia when they lived exclusively in small groups, factors that cause cooperation to break down tend to be those associated with life in large, impersonal, modern societies: when people are not identifiable, when interactions are one-off, when self-interest is not tied to the interests of others, and when people are concerned that others might free ride. From this perspective, it becomes clear that policies for managing pandemics will be most effective when they highlight superordinate goals and connect people or institutions to one another over multiple identifiable interactions. When forging such connections is not possible, policies should mimic critical components of ancestral conditions by providing reputational markers for cooperators and reducing the systemic damage caused by free riding. In this article, we review policies implemented during the pandemic, highlighting spontaneous community efforts that leveraged these aspects of people's evolved psychology, and consider implications for future decision makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A foundational mechanism underlying human cooperation is reciprocity. In the context of repeated interactions with others, it is not always clear the degree to which in-kind responses reflect responsiveness to partners' prior behaviors ("reactive" responses), an interest unrelated to the partner ("nonreactive" responses), or any combination of the two. To disentangle these two types of responses, we presented children with sequential, one-shot, and costly interactions between themselves and either egalitarian or selfish peers. Study 1 tested direct, generalized, and normative reciprocal scenarios (N = 144 seven-year-old German children; 50% girls and 50% boys), finding that "nonreactive" responses were dominant for boys and manifested in the form of "selfish" resource distribution. Among girls, "reactive" responses were dominant and manifested in the form of in-kind resource distribution. Study 2 addressed even younger German children (N = 144; 4- to 8-year-old German children; 50% girls and 50% boys), exposing the same phenomenon among 4-year-olds, but not among 5.5-year-olds. Study 3 addressed 7-year-old Israeli children (N = 95; 49% girls and 51% boys), and replicated the basic phenomenon, with an additional cultural variation. The early emergence of gender differences in reciprocity and implications are discussed in cultural, socio-developmental, and evolutionary accounts. Public Significance Statement: Our research exposed early gender differences in reciprocity. Across reciprocal contexts, age groups (4-, 5.5-, and 7-year-olds), and cultures (Germany and Israel), boys tended to prioritize personal gains, whereas girls focused on peers' behavior and thus exhibited in-kind responses toward prior cooperators and prior noncooperators. By beginning to uncover who is likely to reciprocate, and under which circumstances, our findings offer a foundation for a fuller elucidation of studying human cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reciprocity and pseudo‐reciprocity are two important models for the evolution of cooperation and often considered alternative hypotheses. Reciprocity is typically defined as a scenario where help given causes help received: cooperation is stabilized because each actor's cooperative investments are conditional on the cooperative returns from the receiver. Pseudo‐reciprocity is a scenario where help enables byproduct returns: cooperation is inherently stable because the actor's cooperative investments yield byproduct returns from the receiver's self‐serving behavior. These models are strict alternatives only if reciprocity is defined by the restrictive assumption of zero fitness interdependence, meaning that the helper has no "stake" in the receiver's fitness. Reciprocity and interdependence are, however, not mutually exclusive when helping can increase both reciprocal help and byproduct returns. For instance, helping partners survive can simultaneously increase their willingness to reciprocate, their ability to reciprocate, and byproduct benefits of their existence. Interdependence can "pave the road" to reciprocal helping, and partners who reciprocate help can also become interdependent. However, larger cooperative investments can increase the need for responsiveness to partner returns. Therefore, most long‐term cooperative relationships involve both responsiveness and interdependence. Categorizing these relationships as "reciprocity" can be viewed as ignoring interdependence, but calling them 'pseudo‐reciprocity' is confusing because stability also comes from the cooperative investments being conditional on returns. Rather than conceptualizing cooperation into discrete categories, it is more insightful to imagine a coordinate system with responsiveness and interdependence as continuous dimensions. One can ask: To what degree is helping behavior responsive to the partner's behavior? And to what degree does the helper inherently benefit from the receiver's survival or reproduction? The amounts of responsiveness and interdependence will often be hard to estimate, but both are unlikely to be zero. Identifying their relative importance, and how that changes over time, would greatly clarify the nature of cooperative relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reciprocity is one of the most prominent explanations for the evolution of stable cooperation. Although reciprocity has been studied for decades in numerous animal species and behavioural contexts, its underlying proximate mechanisms remain unclear. Domestic dogs provide a useful model species for the study of proximate mechanisms, though there are currently inconsistent findings regarding dogs' propensity to reciprocate. Here, we investigated whether, after minimal training, pet dogs would press a button, which remotely controlled a food dispenser, to deliver food to an enclosure occupied by a helpful conspecific that had provided them with food or an unhelpful conspecific that had not provided them with food. We included an asocial control condition in which the enclosure was unoccupied and a social facilitation control in which the food delivery mechanism was non‐functional. Whether subjects were familiar with the helpful and unhelpful conspecifics was also varied. In addition, to investigate potential mechanisms underlying reciprocity, we measured subjects salivary oxytocin concentration before and after they experienced the helpful and unhelpful acts. There was no effect of the previous helpfulness or the familiarity of the partner on the number of times subjects pressed the button. However, there was also no effect of the presence of a partner or the operationality of the food delivery mechanism on the number of button presses, indicating that subjects were not pressing the button to provision the partner. Moreover, the experience of the helpful or unhelpful act did not influence subjects' salivary oxytocin concentration. Variation in findings of reciprocity across studies appears to correspond with differing training protocols. Subjects' understanding of the task in the current study may have been constrained by the limited training received. Additional tests to verify subjects' understanding of such tasks are warranted in future studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reciprocally patterned behavior is widespread in animals in the wild, but experimental evidence has been frustratingly inconsistent. Contrary to earlier contentions that this inconsistency is because reciprocity in non‐human species is a rare or fragile effect, recent authors have argued that the evidence suggests that reciprocity is widespread, that it often relies on cognitive mechanisms that are common across species, and is potentially an important factor in animals' daily lives. Another possible explanation for its apparent rarity, then, is that due to experimental studies' (intentionally) structured environment, they can lack the appropriate context to promote and support reciprocity. Focusing on outcomes from experimental reciprocal tasks in non‐human primates, I consider several factors that may be important, including the identity of the interactors and their relationship to one another, whether there is free choice of partners, whether the individuals are interacting directly, the timing of the interaction, the commodity involved, whether individuals have a reason to reciprocate, and the equity of the interaction. Clarifying the role of each of these factors will help improve experimental tasks and the social and ecological contexts that promote reciprocity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cooperative behaviours, which benefit a recipient, are widespread in the animal kingdom; yet their evolution is not straightforward. Reciprocity, i.e., cooperating with previously experienced cooperative partners, has been suggested to underly cooperation, but has been contested throughout the years. Once a textbook example of reciprocity was cooperative predator inspection, where one or several individuals leave their group to approach a potential threat. Each can at any point stop or retreat, increasing the risk for its partner. It was suggested that inspecting individuals follow a specific reciprocal strategy called tit‐for‐tat, i.e., cooperating on the first move and then copying the partner's last move. Numerous studies provide evidence to support the claim that fish cooperate to inspect predators, including three‐spined sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus), guppies (Poecilia reticulata) and minnows (Phoxinus phoxinus). However, over the past few decades some scholars have expressed scepticism whether predator inspection is indeed a cooperative behaviour or rather a case of by‐product mutualism, which describes behaviours that benefit a partner as a corollary of an otherwise selfish behaviour. For instance, it has been shown that pairs of fish moving in unfamiliar environments appear to coordinate movements even in the absence of predators. Many studies have also used coarse measures of overall approach rates towards predators rather than the fine‐grained analyses necessary to infer tit‐for‐tat in cooperative inspections. Now is the time to return to the question of cooperative predator inspection with new tools and approaches to resolve a decades‐old debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a cross-reading of Smith and Rawls in order to highlight the fundamental role of sympathy, moral sentiments and the idea of reciprocity they contain in Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness, and more specifically in the possibility of ensuring the stability of the ideal, well-ordered society through the development of an appropriate sense of justice. I study their respective moral anthropologies and their analyses of guilt, resentment, indignation and envy, highlighting the fundamental role these moral sentiments play in social cooperation.

In early November 2019, India announced its withdrawal from the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) Agreement, and stated that there is a non-reciprocal trade relationship with RCEP member states, this incident has aroused extensive discussions between India and the international community. We take reciprocity as the perspective and discuss the following three theoretical propositions: (1) Can the reciprocity coefficient be used as a basis for decision-making? (2) What is the influence mechanism of the reciprocity coefficient? (3) How will the reciprocity of RCEP changes in the future? We find that the reciprocity index is a result indicator of trade policy and trade network status. It is affected by the trade policy and trade status of related countries in the short term. It can be regarded as a warning and decision-making reference directional indicator. However, it cannot be used as a basic index for trade policy adjustments, India should reconsider this decision or choose other ways to participate in RCEP's regional cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates that foreign policies of reciprocity entail previously unrecognized tradeoffs. The conventional wisdom in international relations holds that reciprocating another state's cooperative and non-cooperative actions can simultaneously promote cooperation and allow states with compatible preferences to build trust. We present a model that synthesizes recent work on signaling and cooperation to identify a tension between the goals of building long-term trust and inducing short-term cooperation. Specifically, a receiver's highly reciprocal strategy generates strong incentives for hostile senders to behave cooperatively, which reduces the credibility of cooperation as a signal of benign intentions. Conversely, a less reciprocal strategy increases the credibility of senders' cooperative signals, but forgoes the benefits of short-term cooperation with hostile states. Thus, uncertain receivers often face a tradeoff between inducing cooperation and eliciting credible signals. We illustrate these tradeoffs in pre-First World War British foreign policy, and highlight the article's policy implications for contemporary US–China relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The "open source" model initially emerged as a way for programmers to collaborate on efforts to build and share code, but has since evolved to embody an ethos of sharing and cooperation that pervades software development as a whole. As many technologists have seen, however, a philosophy of openness can leave them vulnerable to attempts by large corporations to use the norms of open source communities for their own benefits. This article examines the breach of social trust that occurs when companies do not fulfill expectations of reciprocity in their relationships with open source communities, and instead attempt to co-opt their work for monetary gain. Through analysis of three case studies, I seek to emphasize the often misleading nature of these processes and show that they are directly incorporated into the business models of large corporations, even if they are not openly acknowledged as such. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizations are riddled with cooperation problems, that is, instances in which workers need to voluntarily exert effort to achieve efficient collective outcomes. To sustain high levels of cooperation, the experimental literature demonstrates the centrality of reciprocal preferences but has also overlooked some of its negative consequences. In this paper, we ran lab-in-the-field experiments in the context of open-source software development teams to provide the first field evidence that highly reciprocating groups are not necessarily more successful in practice. Instead, the relationship between high reciprocity and performance can be more accurately described as U-shaped. Highly reciprocal teams are generally more likely to fail and only outperform other teams conditional on survival. We use the dynamic structure of our data on field contributions to demonstrate the underlying theoretical mechanism. Reciprocal preferences work as a catalyst at the team level: they reinforce the cooperative equilibrium in good times but also make it harder to recover from a negative signal (the project dies). Our results call into question the idea that strong reciprocity can shield organizations from cooperation breakdowns. Instead, cooperation needs to be dynamically managed through relational contracts. History: This paper has been accepted for the Organization Science Special Issue on Experiments in Organizational Theory. Funding: This research was funded by the consolidator grant agreement [Grant 647870] from the European Research Council, European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (Yann Algan). Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2021.1515. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mechanism of promoting cooperation in the public goods game has always been concerned by scholars. However, most of the existing studies are based on the premise that participants are self-interested. In order to explore why some sellers on e-commerce platforms voluntarily maintain the platform's reputation, we incorporate heterogeneous social preferences of sellers into the spatial public goods game. We find that heterogeneous social preferences can enhance cooperation by improving collective rationality. Specifically, the altruistic preference of sellers can greatly reduce free-riding behavior, while the inequality aversion preference has a little inhibitory effect. Interestingly, when the benefit of maintaining the platform's reputation is relatively high, the reciprocal preference can inhibit cooperation, but it can promote cooperation when the benefit is relatively small. This is due to the existence of some loosely connected but stable cooperative or defective clusters of sellers in e-commerce platforms. Furthermore, we propose a dynamic punishment mechanism to punish free riders. We observe that the dynamic punishment mechanism is more effective than the static punishment mechanism in solving the second-order free-riding problem faced by punishers. Increasing the enhancement factor of public goods is identified as a fundamental approach to mitigating this problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adaptive mimicry in animals is a well-known phenomenon. Here, we propose that a similarly adaptive strategy in humans is using kin terms for people who are not closely genetically related. Irrespective of the initiator attributing a kin term to a non-kin, we call this kin term mimicry (KTM). The emergence of human sociality and language allowed not only easy kin recognition, but also led to strong positive emotions related to such kin names as "mother," "father," "brother," "sister," "aunt" or "uncle." Although the phenomenon of using kin terms of genetically unrelated people is well known in the social sciences, here we discuss it in the light of evolution. We notice this is an evolutionary adaptive cooperation strategy, which allows us to predict in which ecological or social circumstances it will be more prevalent. We postulate specific testable factors that affect the prevalence of kin mimicry. We also discuss who is more likely to be an initiator of calling non-kin a fictive kin, and who benefits from such behavior. The KTM hypothesis postulates that an individual or social group initiating or bestowing kin terms usually receives more benefits (economic and/or psychological support) from such mimicry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite an increased number of case studies simulating social problems in the classroom, due attention has been rarely paid to social dilemma games in light of teaching the key concepts of sociology. We propose a paper-and-pencil experiment designed for sizeable students to simultaneously explore various conditions of sustainable cooperation in a Prisoner's Dilemma game, with five steps of in-class activities presented in details. We evaluate experimental results quantitatively and the usefulness of game-based learning on the basis of debriefing interviews. Beside positive effects of repeated dyadic interaction and direct communications on cooperation, it is shown that sharing a common goal with group members in the presence of intergroup competition tends to strengthen reputation-based indirect reciprocity. Students seem to learn more deeply and see wider relevance as a product of engaging in the experiment, generating findings from the simulated data, and associating them with real-world examples of reciprocity. Our case study on teaching social dilemma through a simple but novel classroom experiment may provide valuable information to educators and practitioners interested in the effective use of economic games as an interactive teaching method for undergraduates in the setting of higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans form and maintain friendships across long distances, which can provide access to non-local resources and support against large shocks that affect the entire local community. However, there may be a greater risk of defection in long-distance friendships, as monitoring for defection is more difficult at greater distances; accordingly, help between long-distance friends may be more explicitly contingent than between close-distance friends. We interviewed 918 participants from 21 fishing villages in Tanzania about whether they had received help in the form of a gift or loan from a friend living in their village and a friend living in a neighboring village. As there are local expectations that loans will be repaid but gifts will not, we predicted that close-distance friends would be more likely to help with gifts, whereas long-distance friends would be more likely to help with loans. Contrary to our predictions, gifts and loans between close- and long-distance friends were similar in kind and amount, though close-distance friends provided help more frequently, possibly because close-distance friends are more likely to meet frequently and belong to the same religious congregation. These results indicate that long-distance friendships are an important, and likely robust, strategy for managing risk and accessing more resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social rights have been considered positive rights that do not require them to be part of the constitution. The most common objection against constitutional social rights holds that social rights are welfare rights and that, by nature, the Constitution should protect only rights of non-interference. In this paper, I show that the previous thesis is debatable, and I offer a liberal argument to defend the constitutionalisation of social rights. In general terms, the arguments presented rest on two main ideas of Rawls's thought linked to his conception of citizens as autonomous persons, as well as to his conception of society. In particular, the paper proposes a systematic understanding of the two principles of justice and an analysis of the notions of society as a system of mutual cooperation, as well as the ideas of self-respect and moral powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After decades of research on the topic of reciprocity, there is still no consensus about the meaning of the term. Instead, there has been a proliferation of reciprocity terms with varied definitions, some of which overlap in ways that lead to confusion for scholars studying cooperation. In this paper, we provide a summary of 34 reciprocity terms and their definitions from across a variety of disciplines. We then report the results of a survey of cooperation experts spanning biology, anthropology, economics, sociology, and psychology (N = 85) about the extent to which they consider 30 of these definitions of reciprocity to be truly reciprocity. Experts also rated the extent to which they considered seventeen hypothetical scenarios to be examples of reciprocity. We used exploratory factor analysis and found that responses clustered around four dimensions of transfers: Balanced (e.g., Balanced reciprocity), Reputation-based (e.g., Generalized reciprocity), Debt-based (e.g., Calculated reciprocity), and Unconditional (e.g., Negative reciprocity). Although researchers agreed that the term reciprocity was useful and necessary, there was low agreement among scholars about what should be considered reciprocity. However, there was high agreement that unconditional transfers, which are characterized by a lack of expectations of repayment, should not be considered reciprocity. We propose that scholars of cooperation consider using these four dimensions when referring to cooperative transfers rather than using reciprocity terms in order to facilitate communication across disciplines, resolve issues related to ambiguous definitions of reciprocity, and provide a solution to the lack of consensus about what constitutes reciprocity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reciprocal food exchange is widespread in human societies but not among great apes, who may view food mainly as a target for competition. Understanding the similarities and differences between great apes' and humans' willingness to exchange food is important for our models regarding the origins of uniquely human forms of cooperation. Here, we demonstrate in-kind food exchanges in experimental settings with great apes for the first time. The initial sample consisted of 13 chimpanzees and 5 bonobos in the control phases, and the test phases included 10 chimpanzees and 2 bonobos, compared with a sample of 48 human children aged 4 years. First, we replicated prior findings showing no spontaneous food exchanges in great apes. Second, we discovered that when apes believe that conspecifics have 'intentionally' transferred food to them, positive reciprocal food exchanges (food-for-food) are not only possible but reach the same levels as in young children (approx. 75–80%). Third, we found that great apes engage in negative reciprocal food exchanges (no-food for no-food) but to a lower extent than children. This provides evidence for reciprocal food exchange in great apes in experimental settings and suggests that while a potential mechanism of fostering cooperation (via positive reciprocal exchanges) may be shared across species, a stabilizing mechanism (via negative reciprocity) is not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the last recorded formal duel in the U.S. as an introductory framework, this essay explores how adjudication and conciliation, two distinct modes of dispute processing, interact to affect social evolution. Evolutionary transitions and the fitness of more complex entities, such as pro-social animal societies, require ongoing stable cooperation among constituent members. Cultural mechanisms of law and conciliation harness different aspects of evolved reciprocal behavior to address these requirements. Building on the work of mid-20th century legal philosopher Lon Fuller, the essay examines how adjudication and conciliation may work in social evolution. It concludes with examples of how law itself attempts to address the conflict between these two modes of dispute processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Development economists have often argued that South–South flows of capital and aid are devoid of the conditionalities and hierarchies that define North–South flows of the same. Maussians and neo‐Maussians maintain that gifting—which allows for the ethos of reciprocity—leads to the formation of more equal international partnerships. This article focusses on India's development diplomacy. We unpack Indian cultural notions of 'gifting', which do not allow for imaginings of reciprocity, and show how 'the gift' has been strategically employed by Indian actors as a tool of state‐making to forge relations of hierarchy and dependence globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extensive experimental research on public good games documents that many subjects are "conditional cooperators" in that they positively correlate their contribution with (their belief about) contributions of other subjects in their peer group. The goal of our study is to shed light on what preference and decision-making patterns drive this observed regularity. We consider reciprocity, conformity, inequality aversion and residual factors, such as confusion and anchoring, as potential explanations. Effects of these drivers are separated by varying how others' contributions are determined and the informational content of the conditioning variable across treatments. Assuming additive separability of the effects of the four drivers, we find that, of the average conditionally cooperative behavior, at least 40 percent is driven by residual factors. For the remainder, most is accounted for by inequality aversion, some by conformity and very little by reciprocity. These findings carry an important message for how to interpret conditional cooperation observed in the lab. We also discuss what these findings mean for understanding conditional cooperation in fundraising applications in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of stakeholder management have long grappled with the question of how to communicate with stakeholders to enhance cooperation and reduce conflict. We build on insights from the literature on stakeholder dialog to highlight the importance of four elements of firm–stakeholder dialog processes: timing, valence, richness, and topicality of firms' responses to stakeholder engagements. We demonstrate a link between these elements of the firm–stakeholder dialog process and changes in stakeholder cooperation or conflict with the firm, as well as contingent tradeoffs among them. Specifically, we show that the relative importance of these elements is contingent upon stakeholder type and status. Government actors prioritize richness and topicality over timeliness and valence. Economic actors, by contrast, prioritize timeliness and valence. Civil society stakeholders prioritize timeliness, valence, and topicality over richness. Low-status actors across sectors deprioritize topicality and richness while high-status actors demand attentiveness to all four elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moral emotions (i.e. guilt, shame) and interpersonal processes such as fairness have been theorised to facilitate cooperation within society. However, empirical tests to support this association have yielded inconsistent results. The present research investigated whether guilt and shame have an impact on fairness-related decision-making and reciprocity-driven cooperation. College students (N = 94) were assigned to one of three experimental conditions (Guilt vs. Shame vs. Control) and instructed to complete an iterated Ultimatum Game against two anonymous partners. We manipulated social context so that one partner would appear as predominantly fair, and the other as predominantly unfair. For guilt, we found that participants (assigned as proposers) reciprocated fair partners with significantly larger amounts of money (i.e. positive reciprocity). For shame, we found that participants had higher rejection rates of unfair splits, and subsequently offered less money to unfair partners (i.e. negative reciprocity). We argue that both guilt and shame benefit fairness-related judgments, guilt by endorsing fairness, and shame by punishing unfairness. Our results also show that guilt and shame benefit reciprocity-driven cooperation, although they do so via different pathways. Our findings suggest that guilt promotes cooperation via positive reciprocity, whereas shame stabilises cooperation via negative reciprocity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the post-modern era the social bond is weaker and we have given up the idea of progress. The reciprocity that we attributed to primary institutions and to societies founded on kinship, now is closer. By discouraging social alarm, the reciprocity is becoming the basic ingredient of human life. We no longer look for it in macrosystems and universal rules, but in everyday life and in specific realities, equipped with their systems of cooperation. This article proposes a specific thesis about it, in which cultural dynamics are anchored, even if with prudence, to the historical and relational dynamics, and the sources of reciprocity are traced both in kinship and friendship. Friendship is proposed as a personal and chosen relationship, maintained voluntarily by subjects who consider themselves distinct and equal and who establish a symmetrical reciprocity between them, characterized by an idealized declaration of no instrumentality. It is proposed that this relational paradigm has been the ideal reference for Western institutions and for the subjectivities they developed, standardizing with its characteristics the structure of societies and the forms of knowledge. Sociality as an end in itself proposed by the paradigm of friendship, far from being a factor of inhibition to social action, is instead an effective enhancement. In fact, friendship needs to be expressed in actions of mutual and manifest benevolence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Begging signals are widespread in animals and have been extensively studied in the context of brood care. In contrast, the functionality of begging signals expressed among adults has not yet been scrutinised experimentally. Norway rats (Rattus norvegicus) have been shown to express 50‐kHz calls towards a social partner when in need of help to obtain food. Here, we tested with help of playbacks whether focal subjects exposed to a high rate of ultrasonic calls would increase their helping rate towards their social partner. The propensity to help a partner was significantly enhanced when the focal rats were exposed to playback with a doubled number of calls relative to baseline conditions. To the best of our knowledge, this provides the first evidence of increased help in response to an experimentally altered begging signal in adult animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decision rule of direct reciprocity states that an individual helps someone who previously helped them. An alternative explanation to observations of reciprocal exchanges of help is copying by imitation. Norway rats, Rattus norvegicus , are known to exchange food and allogrooming reciprocally among social partners. We asked whether this behaviour is based on copying by imitation or the application of the direct reciprocity decision rule. Norway rats used a sequential food-pulling paradigm. To assess whether focal rats help according to the direct reciprocity decision rule, we predicted that focal rats should be less helpful to partners from an experimental defection or self-pulling treatment than to partners that previously helped them in a cooperation treatment. To assess whether focal rats help partners by copying via imitation, we predicted that focal rats should be more helpful to partners that previously pulled more often than to partners that had pulled less often. The experimental design involved experience phases consisting of three treatments and three sessions per treatment for each experimental subject, in which a partner operated a stick-pulling apparatus providing food to the focal rat or only for themselves. This was followed by a test phase in which the focal rat could help the partners. Focal rats gave less help to partners from the defection or self-pulling treatments than to previously cooperative partners, and latency to the first help by focal rats was longer for partners from the self-pulling treatments than for cooperative partners, which are results consistent with the direct reciprocity decision rule. Focal rats did not give more help to partners that pulled more often, which is not consistent with copying by imitation. Hence our results are consistent with the direct reciprocity decision rule but not with copying by imitation. • We tested if rats help partners by direct reciprocity or via copying by imitation. • Focal rats gave less help to self-serving partners than to cooperative partners. • Focal rats took longer to help self-serving partners than cooperative partners. • The results were consistent with the direct reciprocity decision rule. • In contrast, the results were not consistent with copying by imitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sometimes people help one another expecting to be repaid, while at other times people help without an expectation of repayment. What might underlie this difference in expectations of repayment? We investigate this question in a nationally representative sample of US adults (N = 915), and find that people are more likely to expect repayment when needs are perceived to be more predictable. We then replicate these findings in a new sample of US adults (N = 417), and show that people have higher expectations of repayment when needs are perceived to be more predictable because people assign greater responsibility to others for experiencing such predictable needs (e.g., needing money for utilities). This is consistent with previous work based on smaller-scale societies, which shows that the predictability of needs influences expectations of repayment. Our results also add to this previous work by (1) showing that the positive relationship between predictability of needs and expectations of repayment previously found in smaller-scale communities is generalizable to the US population, and (2) showing that attributions of responsibility partially mediate this relationship. This work shows that the predictability of needs and attributions of responsibility for that need are important factors underlying the psychology of helping in times of need.

THE CROSS BORDER COOPERATION BETWEEN ROMANIA AND UKRAINE HAD A SLOW START BUT WITH THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE JOINT OPERATIONAL PROGRAMME ROMANIA-UKRAINEMOLDOVA 2007-2014 AND AFTER THAT THE SECOND PROGRAMME FOCUSED ONLY ON ROMANIA AND UKRAINE, THE CROSS BORDER COOPERATION BETWEEN THIS TWO COUNTRIES BEGAN TO INTENSIFY, CREATING THE COOPERATION FRAMEWORK AT ALL LEVELS. BECAUSE OF THIS, THE PRIVATE OR THE PUBLIC SECTORS EITHER FROM ROMANIA OR UKRAINE BEGUN TO CREATE THEIR OWN PROJECTS OR THEIR OWN FORM OF COOPERATION. THIS IS HOW STARTING WITH A COOPERATION BETWEEN CERTAIN LINE, DICTATED BY THE JOINT OPERATIONAL PROGRAM, THE TWO STATES BEGAN TO CONSIDER THE REAL BENEFITS OF COOPERATION. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Strangers routinely cooperate and exchange goods without any knowledge of one another in one-off encounters without recourse to a third party, an interaction that is fundamental to most human societies. However, this act of reciprocal exchange entails the risk of the other agent defecting with both goods. We examine the choreography for safe exchange between strangers, and identify the minimum requirement, which is a shared hold, either of an object, or the other party; we show that competing agents will settle on exchange as a local optimum in the space of payoffs. Truly safe exchanges are rarely seen in practice, even though unsafe exchange could mean that risk-averse agents might avoid such interactions. We show that an 'implicit' hold, whereby an actor believes that they could establish a hold if the other agent looked to be defecting, is sufficient to enable the simple swaps that are the hallmark of human interactions and presumably provide an acceptable trade-off between risk and convenience. We explicitly consider the particular case of purchasing, where money is one of the goods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research demonstrates numerous benefits of mutual commitments between parties. However, less is understood about the effect of unilateral commitments, when one party (the committer) makes a relationship‐specific investment without an established current or forthcoming reciprocal commitment by the other party (the recipient). This problem is particularly relevant in the supply chain management domain, where organizations often make investments in their supply chain partners, and frequently assume great risks in doing so. To help organizations understand how they can initiate unilateral commitments to their benefit, we develop theory regarding the outcomes of unilateral commitments based on their temporal duration. We evaluate our hypothesis using data collected from three distinct studies, each using different methodologies and samples: a laboratory experiment of graduate students, a vignette experiment of operations management practitioners, and a secondary data analysis of baseball contracts. We find compelling support that unilateral commitments of shorter duration successfully drive recipient cooperative behavior; however, a significant decrease in recipient cooperation results from longer term unilateral commitments. Our research contributes broadly to the literature on unilateral commitments, and in particular its manifestation within supply chain management, where this research stands to make substantial impact due to the prevalence of unilateral commitments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cooperation and prosociality are among traditional research issues in many scholarly disciplines, whereby they also have received attention in ethnology. In the text I address the complex relationship between forms of cooperation and kinship. My aim is to analyse particular types of cooperation recorded during ethnographic research and to show what mechanisms support its effective functioning. When resolving this research issue I apply the theoretical perspective of evolutionary anthropology, which is a powerful tool to explain how universal characteristics, such as cooperation, manifest themselves in different social and cultural contexts. The treatise is based on empirical data collected during ethnographic research in a rural setting in western Slovakia. Long-term ethnographic research based on the method of ethnographic interviewing and participant observation makes it possible to describe and analyse all the nuances of cooperation in a particular locality. The village in which the research took place is located in the White Carpathians near the border with the Czech Republic, and it features a scattered settlement. The treatise analyses specific mechanisms supporting the functioning and maintenance of cooperation in the locality: kinship, reciprocity (direct and indirect) and reputation. As resulting from the data analysis, the people do not limit cooperation to close or distant relatives. The choice of a cooperation partner depends on many factors, with the degree of kinship being only one of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the number of people fleeing Syria since 2011 exceeding 5 million, and unclear prospects regarding the country's future, Syrians currently residing outside their homeland are not expected to return any time soon. The question of their integration into their respective hosting countries is, therefore, directly policy relevant. We focus on Syrians who fled to Egypt. Cultural, religious and linguistic differences between those two countries are minor, which is expected to facilitate integration. We ran three incentivized lab-in-the-field experiments pairing 114 Syrian refugees residing in Egypt with 194 Egyptian nationals to measure various behavioral dimensions such as altruism, cooperation and reciprocity, while varying the partner in each game to be either a refugee or an Egyptian. Our findings indicate that Egyptians treat Syrians more favorably than they treat each other across all games, whereas the behavior of Syrians does not depend on the identity of their interaction partner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]