The Iron Law of Selfishness: Response to a comment by Alexander Field

Ted Bergstrom ()

No 2003B, University of California at Santa Barbara, Economics Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, UC Santa Barbara

Abstract: Alexander Field was not convinced of a result that I claimed in my JEP 2001 paper that in "haystack models" with non-assortative mating, if the number of descendants of founding group members is determined by an n-player prisoners' dilemma game, then the population will converge to a population of defectors. He thought that the result applied only if the groups were large. I respond with a more detailed discussion and show how the result works even when groups have only two members.

Keywords: altruism; assortative matching; group selection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003-05-01
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