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Evolving to Divide the Fruits of Cooperation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Elliott O. Wagner
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Abstract

Cooperation and the allocation of common resources are core features of social behavior. Games idealizing both interactions have been studied separately. But here, rather than examining the dynamics of the individual games, the interactions are combined so that players first choose whether to cooperate, and then, if they jointly cooperate, they bargain over the fruits of their cooperation. It is shown that the dynamics of the combined game cannot simply be reduced to the dynamics of the individual games and that both cooperation and fair division are more likely in the combined game than in the constituent games taken separately.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 79 , Issue 1 , January 2012 , pp. 81 - 94
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

I would like to thank Brian Skyrms, Simon Huttegger, Kyle Stanford, and Jeff Barrett for thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this article. I am also indebted to Jim Weatherall, Michael Ernst, Mat Yunker, Forrest Fleming, and the other participants of the TBRPL group at the University of California, Irvine, for fascinating demonstrations of the strategic nuances that underpin the norms of fair division in competitive interactions.

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