EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Arbitration supports reciprocity when there are frequent perception errors

Robert Boyd and Sarah Mathew ()
Additional contact information
Robert Boyd: Arizona State University
Sarah Mathew: Arizona State University

Nature Human Behaviour, 2021, vol. 5, issue 5, 596-603

Abstract: Abstract Reciprocity is undermined by perception errors, mistakes that cause disagreement between interacting individuals about past behaviour. Strategies such as win–stay–lose–shift and generous tit-for-tat can re-establish cooperation following a perception error, but only when errors arise infrequently. We introduce arbitration tit-for-tat (ATFT), a strategy that uses third-party arbitration to align players’ beliefs about what transpired when they disagree. We show that, when arbitration is moderately accurate, ATFT is a strong subgame-perfect equilibrium and is evolutionarily stable against a range of strategies that defect, cooperate, ignore arbitration or invoke arbitration unnecessarily. ATFT can persist when perception errors are frequent, arbitration is costly or arbitration is biased. The need for third parties to resolve perception errors could explain why reciprocity is rare in other animals despite opportunities for repeated interactions and why human reciprocity is embedded within culturally transmitted moral norms in which community monitoring plays a role.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-01008-1 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:nat:nathum:v:5:y:2021:i:5:d:10.1038_s41562-020-01008-1

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

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-020-01008-1

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Human Behaviour is currently edited by Stavroula Kousta

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

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:nat:nathum:v:5:y:2021:i:5:d:10.1038_s41562-020-01008-1