A Theory of Evolution, Fairness, and Altruistic Punishment

Hetzer, Moritz; Sornette, Didier

doi:10.2139/ssrn.1927919

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Furthermore, within-group cooperation might be maintained or enhanced by between-groups competition, although this is debated (Bowles (2006) argues in this sense but is contradicted by Langergraber et al (2011)). Finally, one of us implemented an ABM of a public good game with altruistic punishment and found that cooperation can thrive among selfish disadvantageous inequity averse agents (Hetzer and Sornette, 2009), a conclusion also supported by game theoretical calculations (Darcet and Sornette, 2008;Hetzer and Sornette, 2001). This suggests that competitive agents still find it advantageous to cooperate in order to achieve their goals.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 76%

Strong gender differences in reproductive success variance, and the times to the most recent common ancestors

Favre¹,

Sornette²

2012

Journal of Theoretical Biology

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The Time To the Most Recent Common Ancestor (TMRCA) based on human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is estimated to be twice that based on the non-recombining part of the Y chromosome (NRY). These TMRCAs have special demographic implications because mtDNA is transmitted only from mother to child, while NRY is passed along from father to son. Therefore, the former locus reflects female history, and the latter, male history. To investigate what caused the two-to-one female-male TMRCA ratio r F/M = T F /T M in humans, we develop a forward-looking agentbased model (ABM) with overlapping generations. Our ABM simulates agents with individual life cycles, including life events such as reaching maturity or menopause. We implemented two main mating systems: polygynandry and polygyny with different degrees in between. In each mating system, the male population can be either homogeneous or heterogeneous. In the latter case, some males are 'alphas' and others are 'betas', which reflects the extent to which they are favored by female mates. A heterogeneous male population implies a competition among males with the purpose of signaling as alpha males. The introduction of a heterogeneous male population is found to reduce by a factor 2 the probability of finding equal female and male TMRCAs and shifts the distribution of r F/M to higher values. In order to account for the empirical observation of the factor 2, a high level of heterogeneity in the male population is needed: less than half the males can be alphas and betas can have at most half the fitness of alphas for the TMRCA ratio to depart significantly from 1. In addition, we find that, in the modes that maximize the probability of having 1.5 < r F/M < 2.5, the present generation has 1.4 times as many female as male ancestors. We also tested the effect of sex-biased migration and sex-specific death rates and found that these are unlikely to explain alone the sex-biased TM-RCA ratio observed in humans. Our results support the view that we are descended from males who were successful in a highly competitive context, while females were facing a much smaller female-female competition.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 76%

Strong gender differences in reproductive success variance, and the times to the most recent common ancestors

Favre¹,

Sornette²

2012

Journal of Theoretical Biology

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“…Instead, we observe that, while, ceteris paribus, players do cooperate more with an increased observed score in their group, they do so with a (downward) bias, especially for high sums of scores in the group. 6 Figure 3 illustrates the case of image and group scoring 7 : in the picture, we can see that players cooperate less than 80% (on average) of what they should cooperate in order to obtain stable cooperation. This behaviour is also confirmed by an analysis of individual decision making: subjects positively react to observed high scores in their group, but they do not 'reciprocate' enough for cooperation to be stable.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Examples include public goods [1] and common-pool resources situations [2], as modelled using game theory via, for example, prisoner's dilemmas (PD), voluntary contributions games [3,4] or donation games [5]. The common feature of these interactions is that in the absence of a suitable mechanism [6,7] and given insufficient foresight by the players [8,9], the only stable outcome coincides with the socially undesirable one, i.e. absence of cooperation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…See the electronic supplementary material for more information. 7 See the electronic supplementary material for the other cases. 8 These implement the standards of behavioural economics including no deception, compatible incentives and payment, minimal earnings, rights to terminate experiments at any time, data anonymity and confidentiality 9 Available in the electronic supplementary material.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Groups and scores: the decline of cooperation

Duca

Nax

2018

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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Cooperation among unrelated individuals in social-dilemma-type situations is a key topic in social and biological sciences. It has been shown that, without suitable mechanisms, high levels of cooperation/contributions in repeated public goods games are not stable in the long run. Reputation, as a driver of indirect reciprocity, is often proposed as a mechanism that leads to cooperation. A simple and prominent reputation dynamic function through scoring: contributing behaviour increases one's score, non-contributing reduces it. Indeed, many experiments have established that scoring can sustain cooperation in two-player prisoner's dilemmas and donation games. However, these prior studies focused on pairwise interactions, with no experiment studying reputation mechanisms in more general group interactions. In this paper, we focus on groups and scores, proposing and testing several scoring rules that could apply to multi-player prisoners' dilemmas played in groups, which we test in a laboratory experiment. Results are unambiguously negative: we observe a steady decline of cooperation for every tested scoring mechanism. All scoring systems suffer from it in much the same way. We conclude that the positive results obtained by scoring in pairwise interactions do not apply to multi-player prisoner's dilemmas, and that alternative mechanisms are needed.

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“…There are, however, examples [29] when punishment decreases cooperation. While costly punishment, termed altruistic, may facilitate cooperation, at the same time, it can be interpreted as not so altruistic but rather selfish, because the original motivation behind punishment could be to retrieve deserved payoffs from their own contributions on the long run, which is a selfish incentive [30][31][32]. Punishment can also act indirectly, since the defectors, outcompeting cooperators inside a society, weaken the competitive ability of the society as a whole, as is considered in multilevel selection theory [25,[33][34][35][36].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Utility Rate Equations of Group Population Dynamics in Biological and Social Systems

2012

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We present a novel system of equations to describe the evolution of self-organized structured societies (biological or human) composed of several trait groups. The suggested approach is based on the combination of ideas employed in the theory of biological populations, system theory, and utility theory. The evolution equations are defined as utility rate equations, whose parameters are characterized by the utility of each group with respect to the society as a whole and by the mutual utilities of groups with respect to each other. We analyze in detail the cases of two groups (cooperators and defectors) and of three groups (cooperators, defectors, and regulators) and find that, in a self-organized society, neither defectors nor regulators can overpass the maximal fractions of about 10% each. This is in agreement with the data for bee and ant colonies. The classification of societies by their distance from equilibrium is proposed. We apply the formalism to rank the countries according to the introduced metric quantifying their relative stability, which depends on the cost of defectors and regulators as well as their respective population fractions. We find a remarkable concordance with more standard economic ranking based, for instance, on GDP per capita. *

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A Theory of Evolution, Fairness, and Altruistic Punishment

Cited by 4 publications

References 53 publications

Strong gender differences in reproductive success variance, and the times to the most recent common ancestors

Strong gender differences in reproductive success variance, and the times to the most recent common ancestors

Groups and scores: the decline of cooperation

Utility Rate Equations of Group Population Dynamics in Biological and Social Systems

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