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We developed a repeated quantum game of public goods by using quantum entanglement and strong reciprocity mechanisms. Utilizing the framework of quantum game analysis, a comparative investigation incorporating both entangled and non-entangled states reveals that the player will choose a fully cooperative strategy when the expected cooperation strategy of the competitor exceeds a certain threshold. When the entanglement of states is not considered, the prisoner's dilemma still exists, and the cooperating party must bear the cost of defactoring the quantum strategy themselves; when considering the entanglement of states, the benefits of both parties in the game are closely related, forming a community of benefits. By signing a strong reciprocity contract, the degree of cooperation between the game parties can be considered using the strong reciprocity entanglement contract mechanism. The party striving to cooperate does not have to bear the risk of the other party's defector, and to some extent, it can solve the prisoner's dilemma problem. Finally, taking the public goods green planting industry project as an example, by jointly entrusting a third party to determine and sign a strong reciprocity entanglement contract, both parties can ensure a complete quantum strategy to maximize cooperation and achieve Pareto optimality, ultimately enabling the long-term and stable development of the public goods industry project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Faced with the COVID-19 pandemic, some people in Japan have started voluntarily and anonymously policing others who do not engage in infection prevention behaviors. Such extreme ways of enforcing norms to prevent the spread of COVID-19 may have serious consequences since the targets essentially become victims of kangaroo courts. This study examined the possibility that such aggressive behavior is based on strong reciprocity, which is one of the proposed mechanisms that may have made humans super-cooperative. An online survey measured several aspects of strong reciprocity (e.g., altruistic punishment, altruistic rewarding), impressions of and behavioral intentions toward those who violate infection prevention norms and COVID-19 patients, and the degree to which the respondents engaged in infection prevention behaviors. The results revealed that the tendency to engage in altruistic punishment had a positive effect on aggression toward those who violated infection prevention norms and COVID-19 patients only among those who engaged in infection prevention behaviors. This suggests that altruistic punishment may promote aggression toward those who violate infection prevention norms in people who follow such norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 oftenkey 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 allowcooperation 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evolutionists studying human cooperation disagree about how to best explain it. One view is that humans are predisposed to engage in costly cooperation and punishment of free-riders as a result of culture/gene coevolution via group selection. Alternatively, some researchers argue that context-specific cognitive mechanisms associated with traditional neo-Darwinian self- and kin-maximization models sufficiently explain all aspects of human cooperation and punishment. There has been a great deal of research testing predictions derived from both positions; still, researchers generally agree that more naturalistic data are needed to complement mathematical modeling and laboratory and field experiments. Most of these data have been obtained from small-scale forager and other societies, but modern intentional communities offer another productive source of information. This exploratory study describes context-specific patterns of punishment in 46 American intentional communities that cast doubt on the prediction that people are predisposed to punish free-riders in naturalistic interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experiments using the public goods game have repeatedly shown that in cooperative social environments, punishment makes cooperation flourish, and withholding punishment makes cooperation collapse. In less cooperative social environments, where antisocial punishment has been detected, punishment was detrimental to cooperation. The success of punishment in enhancing cooperation was explained as deterrence of free riders by cooperative strong reciprocators, who were willing to pay the cost of punishing them, whereas in environments in which punishment diminished cooperation, antisocial punishment was explained as revenge by low cooperators against high cooperators suspected of punishing them in previous rounds. The present paper reconsiders the generality of both explanations. Using data from a public goods experiment with punishment, conducted by the authors on Israeli subjects (Study 1), and from a study published in Science using sixteen participant pools from cities around the world (Study 2), we found that: 1. The effect of punishment on the emergence of cooperation was mainly due to contributors increasing their cooperation, rather than from free riders being deterred. 2. Participants adhered to different contribution and punishment strategies. Some cooperated and did not punish (‘cooperators’); others cooperated and punished free riders (‘strong reciprocators’); a third subgroup punished upward and downward relative to their own contribution (‘norm-keepers’); and a small sub-group punished only cooperators (‘antisocial punishers’). 3. Clear societal differences emerged in the mix of the four participant types, with high-contributing pools characterized by higher ratios of ‘strong reciprocators’, and ‘cooperators’, and low-contributing pools characterized by a higher ratio of ‘norm keepers’. 4. The fraction of ‘strong reciprocators’ out of the total punishers emerged as a strong predictor of the groups’ level of cooperation and success in providing the public goods.

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 present a useful framework for two aspects of marketing (attraction-promotion and cognition-promotion) and four related factors to foster the success of reward-based crowdfunding ventures. We investigate this issue by analysing data collected from 323 funding projects from four crowdfunding platforms in Taiwan and Japan. We found that the cognition-promotion aspect obviously influenced funding success, because the factors it encompasses – signalling (including founder response, founder updates frequency and having a formal website) and kindness (including donation to other projects and rewarding sponsors) – are all significant in the logistic regression model. Regarding the attraction-promotion aspect, we found that the past experiences of the founder in terms of the attention factor do not influence funding success. Our study contributes to the literature on crowdfunding discussion platforms and engagement, and our empirical results provide a comprehensive message to the founders and sponsors of crowdfunding platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decision making problem considered in this paper is to rank n alternatives from the best to the worst, using the information given by the decision maker in the form of an n×n pairwise comparison matrix. Here, we deal with pairwise comparison matrices with fuzzy elements. Fuzzy elements of the pairwise comparison matrix are applied whenever the decision maker is not sure about the value of his/her evaluation of the relative importance of elements in question. We investigate pairwise comparison matrices with elements from abelian linearly ordered group (alo-group) over a real interval. The concept of reciprocity and consistency of pairwise comparison matrices with fuzzy elements have been already studied in the literature. Here, we define stronger concepts, namely the strong reciprocity and strong consistency of pairwise comparison matrices with fuzzy intervals as the matrix elements (PCF matrices), derive the necessary and sufficient conditions for strong reciprocity and strong consistency and investigate their properties as well as some consequences to the problem of ranking the alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an increasing interest of behavioral economists in the last decades in studying the nature of human cooperation and morality. Several economic games of social dilemmas have been developed to this end. Based on the results of these games, important conclusions are made about human cooperation. Since people in these games all over the world do not behave completely selfishly and give away money, it is taken as demonstrating other important motivations. When people are given the opportunity to punish free-riders, this increases cooperation, which is again interpreted in the sense of altruistic punishment (strong reciprocity) that is considered a key factor in sustaining cooperation. However, these results are in contrast with the anthropological literature on hunter-gatherers’ cooperation, which highlights other important factors sustaining cooperation, such as the possibility to choose partners, and symbolic and coalitional sanctions (weak reciprocity). The aim of the research is to critically analyze these contrasts and illustrate some aspects of cooperation (conflict resolution, dealing with cheaters, and the role of reputation) from the author’s own research of mutual aid among peasants in Serbia.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans regularly help strangers, even when interactions are apparently unobserved and unlikely to be repeated. Such situations have been simulated in the laboratory using anonymous one-shot games (e.g. prisoner's dilemma) where the payoff matrices used make helping biologically altruistic. As in real-life, participants often cooperate in the lab in these one-shot games with non-relatives, despite that fact that helping is under negative selection under these circumstances. Two broad explanations for such behavior prevail. The 'big mistake' or 'mismatch' theorists argue that behavior is constrained by psychological mechanisms that evolved predominantly in the context of repeated interactions with known individuals. In contrast, the cultural group selection theorists posit that humans have been selected to cooperate in anonymous one-shot interactions due to strong between-group competition, which creates interdependence among in-group members. We present these two hypotheses before discussing alternative routes by which humans could increase their direct fitness by cooperating with strangers under natural conditions. In doing so, we explain why the standard lab games do not capture real-life in various important aspects. First, asymmetries in the cost of perceptual errors regarding the context of the interaction (one-shot versus repeated; anonymous versus public) might have selected for strategies that minimize the chance of making costly behavioral errors. Second, helping strangers might be a successful strategy for identifying other cooperative individuals in the population, where partner choice can turn strangers into interaction partners. Third, in many real-world situations individuals are able to parcel investments such that a one-shot interaction is turned into a repeated game of many decisions. Finally, in contrast to the assumptions of the prisoner's dilemma model, it is possible that benefits of cooperation follow a non-linear function of investment. Non-li

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evolutionary theory predicts rigorous competition in nature and selfish behavior is thus seen as its inevitable consequence. Evidence of altruistic and cooperative behavior therefore appears at odds with evolutionary theory. However, evolutionary psychology suggests that past environments may be different from the current environments that humans inhabit. Here it is hypothesized that competition in two past environments might have led to strategies that favored altruism and cooperation toward nonkin. First, the expansion of the human brain is seen as requiring long-term, quality parental investment to sustain it. Altruistic displays could well have signaled an ability and willingness to provide such parental investment in a potential mate and been favored as a result. Second, the development of extra-somatic weapons is seen as leading to competition within hominin groups becoming more costly as disputes would have become lethal. A cooperative strategy could have achieved greater net fitness if the benefits of reduced involvement in such lethal disputes exceeded the costs of cooperation. Genes associated with human altruism and cooperation toward nonkin could thus have increased in frequency and come to be expressed in modern human populations despite the environments in which they evolved no longer being fully evident in the modern world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evolution of large-scale cooperation among strangers is a fundamental unanswered question in the social sciences. Behavioral economics has persuasively shown that the so-called strong reciprocity plays a key role in accounting for the endogenous enforcement of cooperation. Insofar as strongly reciprocal players are willing to costly sanction defectors, cooperation flourishes. However, experimental evidence unambiguously indicates that not only defection and strong reciprocity, but also unconditional cooperation without punishment is a quantitatively important behavioral attitude. By referring to a prisoner’s dilemma framework where punishment (“stick”) and rewarding (“carrot”) options are available, here we show analytically that the presence of cooperators who don’t punish in the population makes altruistic punishment evolutionarily weak. We show that cooperation breaks down and strong reciprocity is maladaptive if costly punishment means “punishing defectors” and, even more so, if it is coupled with costly rewarding of cooperators. In contrast, punishers do not perish if cooperators, far from being rewarded, are sanctioned. These results, based on an extended notion of strong reciprocity, challenge evolutionary explanations of cooperation that overlook the “dark side” of altruistic behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans regularly help strangers, even when interactions are apparently unobserved and unlikely to be repeated. Such situations have been simulated in the laboratory using anonymous one-shot games (e.g., prisoner's dilemma) where the payoff matrices used make helping biologically altruistic. As in real-life, participants often cooperate in the lab in these one-shot games with non-relatives, despite that fact that helping is under negative selection under these circumstances. Two broad explanations for such behavior prevail. The "big mistake" or "mismatch" theorists argue that behavior is constrained by psychological mechanisms that evolved predominantly in the context of repeated interactions with known individuals. In contrast, the cultural group selection theorists posit that humans have been selected to cooperate in anonymous one-shot interactions due to strong between-group competition, which creates interdependence among in-group members. We present these two hypotheses before discussing alternative routes by which humans could increase their direct fitness by cooperating with strangers under natural conditions. In doing so, we explain why the standard lab games do not capture real-life in various important aspects. First, asymmetries in the cost of perceptual errors regarding the context of the interaction (one-shot vs. repeated; anonymous vs. public) might have selected for strategies that minimize the chance of making costly behavioral errors. Second, helping strangers might be a successful strategy for identifying other cooperative individuals in the population, where partner choice can turn strangers into interaction partners. Third, in contrast to the assumptions of the prisoner's dilemma model, it is possible that benefits of cooperation follow a non-linear function of investment. Nonlinear benefits result in negative frequency dependence even in one-shot games. Finally, in many real-world situations individuals are able to parcel investments such that a one-shot interaction is turned into a repeated game of many decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Despite compelling theoretical arguments, research has failed so far to provide conclusive empirical evidence on the relationship between preferences for redistribution and attitudes towards immigration. We argue that social scientists risk making erroneous inferences if the causal link connecting an independent variable to a given outcome is not carefully modelled. This is particularly true in the presence of multiple and partly offsetting intervening variables. We argue that there are at least four motivations linking attitudes towards redistribution and preferred levels of immigration. We observe a statistically significant association between attitudes towards redistribution and preferred levels of immigration, but only after the motivations have been explicitly integrated into the empirical analysis. If the motivations are not explicitly modelled, no systematic relationship between attitudes towards redistribution and preferred levels of immigration can be observed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Bowles and Gintis argue that recent work in behavioural economics shows that humans have other-regarding preferences, i.e., are not purely self-interested. They seek to explain how these preferences may have evolved using a multi-level version of gene-culture coevolutionary theory. In this review essay I critically examine their main arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]