Selfish Altruism, Fierce Cooperation and the Emergence of Cooperative Equilibria from Passing and Shooting

Arbeitspapier

There is continuing debate about what explains cooperation and self-sacrifice in nature and in particular in humans. This paper suggests a new way to think about this famous problem. I argue that, for an evolutionary biologist as well as a quantitative social scientist, the triangle of two players in the presence of a predator (passing and shooting in 2-on-1 situations) is a fundamental conceptual building-block for understanding these phenomena. I show how, in the presence of a predator, cooperative equilibria rationally emerge among entirely selfish agents. If we examine the dynamics of such a model, and bias the lead player (ball possessor with pass/shoot i.e. cooperate/defect dilemma) in the selfish direction by only an infinitesimal amount, then, remarkably, the trajectories of the new system move towards a cooperative equilibrium. I argue that predators are common in the biological jungle but also in everyday human settings. Intuitively, this paper builds on the simple idea - a familiar one to a biologist observing the natural world but perhaps less so to social scientists - that everybody has enemies. As a technical contribution, I solve these models analytically in the unbiased case and numerically by an O(h5) approximation with the Runge-Kutta method.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 7896

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Cooperative Games ; Stochastic and Dynamic Games; Evolutionary Games; Repeated Games ; Econometrics of Games and Auctions ; Neuroeconomics
• Subject: evolutionary game theory ; fitness ; altruism ; evolution of cooperation ; decoy ; Nash equlibrium ; repeated matching-pennies game ; predator ; emergence ; autonomous ODE ; classical Runge-Kutta method

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Askitas, Nikos
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
• (where): Bonn
• (when): 2014

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/93286
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET