Norms of Cooperation in a Game of Partnership

Massimiliano Landi () and Pier Luigi Sacco ()

Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, 2001, vol. 7, issue 3, No 3, 233-266

Abstract: Abstract We study a model of partnership with costly commitment in an evolutionary game-theoretic framework. We introduce various types of cooperative players with different degrees of strategic sophistication. We find that a necessary condition for cooperation at the social equilibrium is that the probability of a high opportunity value falls below a certain critical threshold. Such condition, however, is not sufficient. If players are too naively cooperative, the permanence of cooperation at the equilibrium is put at risk because naive cooperation entails playing inefficient responses to other equilibrium strategies. As a consequence, naive cooperation will be present at the equilibrium selected by the social dynamics only under somewhat special conditions. If cooperators are more flexible, in that they remain in the partnership only if mated to a first stage cooperator and only in lack of favorable outside opportunities, cooperation is almost granted provided that it is Pareto efficient (perverse lock in cases under unfavorable initial conditions are possible). Finally, the selection of Pareto superior cooperation with certainty may be granted by a certain norm-oriented type of strategically sophisticated behavior, that we call Rawlsian altruism.

Keywords: evolution; replicator dynamics; social norms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2001
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1023/A:1011946403381 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:comaot:v:7:y:2001:i:3:d:10.1023_a:1011946403381

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10588

DOI: 10.1023/A:1011946403381

Access Statistics for this article

Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory is currently edited by Terrill Frantz and Kathleen Carley

More articles in Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().