Until recently, theorists considering the evolution of human cooperation have paid little attention to institutional punishment, a defining feature of large-scale human societies. Compared to individually-administered punishment, institutional punishment offers a unique potential advantage: the...

This paper analyzes the dynamic stability of moral codes in a two population trust game. Guided by a moral code, members of one population, the Trustors, are willing to punish members of the other population, the Trustees, who defect. Under replicator dynamics, adherence to the moral code has...

We propose a bargaining process supergame over the strategies to play in a non-cooperative game. The agreement reached by players at the end of the bargaining process is the strategy profile that they will play in the original non-cooperative game. We analyze the subgame perfect equilibria of...

We study framing effects in repeated social dilemmas by comparing payoff-equivalent Give- and Take-framed public goods games under varying matching mechanisms (Partners or Strangers) and levels of feedback (Aggregate or Individual). In the Give-framed game, players contribute to a public good,...

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....

Despite recent advances in reputation technologies, it is not clear how reputation systems can affect human cooperation in social networks. Although it is known that two of the major mechanisms in the evolution of cooperation are spatial selection and reputation-based reciprocity, theoretical...

We analyze the social and private learning at the symmetric equilibria of a queueing game with strategic experimentation. An infinite sequence of agents arrive at a server which processes them at an unknown rate. The number of agents served at each date is either: a geometric random variable in...

We study impersonal exchange, and ask how agents can behave honestly in anonymous transactions without contracts. We analyze repeated anonymous random matching games, where agents observe only their own transactions. Little is known about cooperation in this setting beyond the prisoner's...

We study models of learning in games where agents with limited memory use social information to decide when and how to change their play. When agents only observe the aggregate distribution of payoffs and only recall information from the last period, aggregate play comes close to Nash...

This paper studies infinite-horizon stochastic games in which players observe payoffs and noisy public information about a hidden state each period. We find that, very generally, the feasible and individually rational payoff set is invariant to the initial prior about the state in the limit as...