A recent series of papers has introduced a fresh perspective on the problem of the evolution of human cooperation by suggesting an amendment to the concept of cooperation itself: instead of thinking of cooperation as playing a particular strategy in a given game, usually C in the prisoner's...

The Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) is widely used to model social interaction between unrelated individuals in the study of the evolution of cooperative behaviour in humans and other species. Many effective mechanisms and promotive scenarios have been studied which allow for small founding groups of...

Phenomena like meat sharing in hunter-gatherers, altruistic self-sacrifice in intergroup conflicts, and contribution to the production of public goods in laboratory experiments have led to the development of numerous theories trying to explain human prosocial preferences and behavior. Many of...

This paper provides an empirical investigation of severe misconducts in contests based on data from European football championships. We differentiate between two types of severe misconducts both resulting in a yellow card, namely dissents with the referee and other misconducts, and between...

In evolutionary models of indirect reciprocity, reputation mechanisms can stabilize cooperation even in severe cooperation problems like the prisoner's dilemma. Under certain circumstances, conditionally cooperative strategies, which cooperate iff their partner has a good reputation, cannot be...

The historical record knows only few instances of democracies waging war against each other. Therefore, democratization is considered key in achieving global peace. However, efforts to achieve sustained democratic governance often fail-Afghanistan being a recent example. Democratization appears...