We analyse interethnic cooperation in an infinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma when members of one group are unable to target punishment towards individual defectors from the other group. We first show that indiscriminate outgroup punishment may sustain cooperation in this setting. Our main...

Previous research shows that collective action to avoid a catastrophic threshold, such as a climate "tipping point", is unaffected by uncertainty about the impact of crossing the threshold but that collective action collapses if the location of the threshold is uncertain. Theory suggests that...

This paper analyzes the ability of group members to cooperate in rent-seeking in a context of between-group competition. For this purpose, we develop an infinitely repeated rent-seeking model with two groups where within-group cooperation is supported through the use of a double-edged trigger...

Civic ("sociotropic") concerns are a main source of public opposition to immigration. Yet whether such concerns stem from ethnic biases remains contested because research consistently focuses on native attitudes toward outgroup members. This lack of variation in intergroup relations limits...

Abstract: This essay makes a conceptual distinction between societal categories, such as social networks, norms, and social status differentiation, on the one hand, and social capital, on the other. The former are institutional phenomena arising as outcomes of social-exchange games in which...

Strategy changes are an essential part of evolutionary games. Here we introduce a simple rule that, depending on the value of a single parameter w, influences the selection of players that are considered as potential sources of the new strategy. For positive w players with high payoffs will be...

In traditional game theory, strategies are equivalent with actions and mixed strategies are the only extension. As a new extension, strategies are interpreted as plans. Although most plans are not very interesting (like doing a certain action), some conditional plans are. For example, they...

In the last few decades, numerous experiments have shown that humans do not always behave so as to maximize their material payoff. Cooperative behavior when non-cooperation is a dominant strategy (with respect to the material payoffs) is particularly puzzling. Here we propose a novel approach to...