Evolving cooperation in multichannel games

Kate Donahue (), Oliver Hauser, Martin A. Nowak and Christian Hilbe ()
Additional contact information
Kate Donahue: Cornell University
Martin A. Nowak: Harvard University
Christian Hilbe: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology

Nature Communications, 2020, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract Humans routinely engage in many distinct interactions in parallel. Team members collaborate on several concurrent projects, and even whole nations interact with each other across a variety of issues, including trade, climate change and security. Yet the existing theory of direct reciprocity studies isolated repeated games. Such models cannot account for strategic attempts to use the vested interests in one game as a leverage to enforce cooperation in another. Here we introduce a general framework of multichannel games. Individuals interact with each other over multiple channels; each channel is a repeated game. Strategic choices in one channel can affect decisions in another. With analytical equilibrium calculations for the donation game and evolutionary simulations for several other games we show that such linkage facilitates cooperation. Our results suggest that previous studies tend to underestimate the human potential for reciprocity. When several interactions occur in parallel, people often learn to coordinate their behavior across games to maximize cooperation in each of them.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17730-3 Abstract (text/html)

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:nat:natcom:v:11:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-020-17730-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-17730-3

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

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