Reciprocity Outperforms Conformity to Promote Cooperation

Harnessing Reciprocity to Promote Cooperation and the Provisioning of Public Goods

How can we maximize the common good? This is a central organizing question of public policy design, across political parties and ideologies. The answer typically involves the provisioning of public goods such as fresh air, national defense, and knowledge. Public goods are costly to produce but benefit everyone, thus creating a social dilemma: Individual and collective interests are in tension. ...

Indirect reciprocity with negative assortment and limited information can promote cooperation.

Cooperation is ubiquitous in biological and social systems, even though cooperative behavior is often costly and at risk of exploitation by non-cooperators. Several studies have demonstrated that indirect reciprocity, whereby some members of a group observe the behaviors of their peers and use this information to discriminate against previously uncooperative agents in the future, can promote pr...

Conformity enhances network reciprocity in evolutionary social dilemmas

The pursuit of highest payoffs in evolutionary social dilemmas is risky and sometimes inferior to conformity. Choosing the most common strategy within the interaction range is safer because it ensures that the payoff of an individual will not be much lower than average. Herding instincts and crowd behaviour in humans and social animals also compel to conformity in their own right. Motivated by ...

Mechanisms to promote cooperation in decentralized service

In distributed environments where entities only have a partial view of the system collaboration plays a key role. In the case of decentralized service discovery in service-oriented Multi-Agent Systems, agents only know about the services they provide and their direct neighbors. Therefore, they need the cooperation of their neighbors in order to locate the required services. However, cooperation...

Evolutionary Pathways to Group Cooperation: Reputation, Reciprocity, and Signaling