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...

Case studies of cartels and recent theory suggest that repeated communication is key for stable cooperation in environments where signals about others' actions are noisy. However, empirically the exact role of communication is not well understood. We study cooperation under different monitoring...

Social interactions predominantly take place under the shadow of the future. Previous literature explains cooperation in indefinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma as predominantly driven by self-interested strategic considerations. This paper provides a causal test of the importance of social...

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...

When the repeated prisoner's dilemma setup is generalized to allow for a unilateral breakup, maximal efficiency in equilibrium remains an open question. With restrictions of simple symmetry with eternal mutual cooperation, defection, or (matched) alternation on the equilibrium path, we describe...

There is continuing debate about what explains cooperation and self-sacrifice in nature and in particular in humans. This paper suggests a new way to think about this famous problem. I argue that, for an evolutionary biologist as well as a quantitative social scientist, the triangle of two...

We study the coevolution of cooperation, preferences and cooperative signals in an environment where individuals engage in a signaling-extended prisoner's dilemma. We identify a new type of evolutionary equilibrium - a transitional equilibrium - which is constituted and stabilized by the dynamic...

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....

In a voluntary partnership prisoner's dilemma, equilibrium discounted payoff at the origin of a partnership also serves as the worst feasible threat with which to sustain cooperation. In a population model, we introduce the Markov strategy and characterize neutrally stable equilibrium. We...

We investigate whether two players in a long-run relationship can maintain cooperation when the details of the underlying game are unknown. Specifically, we consider a new class of repeated games with private monitoring, where an unobservable state of the world influences the payoff functions...