Evolutionary study of interethnic cooperation

Vladimir Kvasnicka () and Jiri Pospichal ()
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Vladimir Kvasnicka: Department of Mathematics, Slovak Technical University, 812 37 Bratislava, Slovakia
Jiri Pospichal: Department of Mathematics, Slovak Technical University, 812 37 Bratislava, Slovakia

Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), 1999, vol. 02, issue 04, 395-421

Abstract: The purpose of this communication is to present an evolutionary study of cooperation between two ethnic groups. The used model is stimulated by the recent seminal paper of J. D. Fearon and D. D. Laitin (Explaining Interethnic Cooperation,American Political Science Review, Vol. 90 (1996), pp. 715-735), where the iterated prisoner's dilemma was used to model intra- and interethnic interactions. We reformulated their approach in a form of evolutionary prisoner's dilemma method, where a population of strategies is evolved by applying simple reproduction process with a Darwin metaphor of natural selection (a probability of selection to the reproduction is proportional to a fitness). Our computer simulations show that an application of a principle of collective guilt does not lead to an emergence of an interethnic cooperation. When an administrator is introduced, then an emergence of interethnic cooperation may be observed. Furthermore, if the ethnic groups are of very different sizes, then the principle of collective guilt may be very devastating for smaller group so that intraethnic cooperation is destroyed. The second strategy of cooperation is called the personal responsibility, where agents that defected within interecthinic interactions are punished inside of their ethnic groups. It means, unlikely to the principle of collective guilt, that there exists only one type of punishment, loosely speaking, agents are punished "personally". All the substantial computational results were checked and interpreted analytically within the theory of evolutionary stable strategies. Moreover, this theoretical approach offers mechanisms of simple scenarios explaining why some particular strategies are stable or not.

Keywords: Evolutionary Prisoner's Dilemma; Intraethnic Cooperation; Interethnic Cooperation; Evolutionary Stable Strategy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999
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DOI: 10.1142/S0219525999000205

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