Effect of memory, intolerance, and second-order reputation on cooperation

Abstract

The understanding of cooperative behavior in social systems has been the subject of intense research over the past few decades. In this regard, the theoretical models used to explain cooperation in human societies have been complemented with a growing interest in experimental studies to validate the proposed mechanisms. In this work, we rely on previous experimental findings to build a theoretical model based on two cooperation driving mechanisms: second-order reputation and memory. Specifically, taking the donation game as a starting point, the agents are distributed among three strategies, namely, unconditional cooperators, unconditional defectors, and discriminators, where the latter follow a second-order assessment rule: shunning, stern judging, image scoring, or simple standing. A discriminator will cooperate if the evaluation of the recipient's last actions contained in his memory is above a threshold of (in)tolerance. In addition to the dynamics inherent to the game, another imitation dynamics, involving much longer times (generations), is introduced. The model is approached through a meanfield approximation that predicts the macroscopic behavior observed in Monte Carlo simulations. We found that, while in most second-order assessment rules, intolerance hinders cooperation, it has the opposite (positive) effect under the simple standing rule. Furthermore, we show that, when considering memory, the stern judging rule shows the lowest values of cooperation, while stricter rules show higher cooperation levels.

Effects of a pestilent species on the stability of cyclically dominant species

“…In certain cases it is enough to have just a second-order or latent circular flow of microscopic states to observe similarly surprising and undesigned effects. Therefore if we plan an encroachment into an ecosystem [50], an epidemic and spreading processes [51,52] or change governing laws of societies where effective circles may also be present [53,54] then we should take special care of the subsequent behavior.…”

Improving the Performance of Reputation Evaluation by Combining a Network Structure With Nonlinear Recovery

“…Similar problems exist in other scenarios, e.g., recommendations, selection, and voting, in which the credibility of the evaluators will affect the final result. One of the most important ways to solve this problem is by building reputationevaluation systems [20][21][22][23].…”

Cooperation in costly-access environments

“…Although many works have dealt with it since the original contributions by Trivers [2], Axelrod and Hamilton [3], there is not a universal explanation for the emergence and fixation of cooperation in scenarios where selfish behavior involves a higher individual benefit. Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain it [4], including kin selection [5,6], direct [2] or indirect reciprocity [7,8], group selection [9], and network reciprocity [10][11][12][13][14][15].…”