Reciprocal cooperation can be studied in the Centipede game, in which two players alternate in choosing between a cooperative GO move and a non-cooperative STOP move. GO sustains the interaction and increases the player pair's total payoff while incurring a small personal cost; STOP terminates...

We propose a simple model for why we have more trust in people who cooperate without calculating the associated costs. Intuitively, by not looking at the payoffs, people indicate that they will not be swayed by high temptations to defect, which makes them more attractive as interaction partners....

Theoretical and empirical studies have generally weighed the effect of peer punishment and pool punishment for sanctioning free riders separately. However, these sanctioning mechanisms often pose a puzzling tradeoff between efficiency and stability in detecting and punishing free riders. Here,...

Peer punishment is widely lauded as a decentralized solution to the problem of social cooperation. However, experimental evidence of its effectiveness primarily stems from public good structures. This paper explores peer punishment in another structural setting: a system of generalized exchange....

Cooperation is widely recognized to be fundamental for the well-balanced development of human societies. Several different approaches have been proposed to explain the emergence of cooperation in populations of individuals playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, characterized by two concurrent...

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...

We investigate the effect of the environment dimensionality and different dispersal strategies on the evolution of cooperation in a finite structured population of mobile individuals. We consider a population consisting of cooperators and free-riders residing on a two-dimensional lattice with...

Human cooperation, occurring without reciprocation and between unrelated individuals in large populations, represents an evolutionary puzzle. One potential explanation is that cooperative behaviour may be transmitted between individuals via social learning. Using an online social dilemma...

Evolution of cooperation has traditionally been studied by assuming that individuals adopt either of two pure strategies, to cooperate or defect. Recent work has considered continuous cooperative investments, turning full cooperation and full defection into two opposing ends of a spectrum and...