期刊
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
卷 378, 期 1876, 页码 -出版社
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2021.0504
关键词
cooperation; coordination; threshold public goods game; inequality; asymmetric game; evolutionary game theory
类别
One important use of evolutionary game theory is to study social dilemmas and understand why people cooperate. This study investigates the effect of asymmetry in coordination games and finds that humans prefer to contribute the same proportion of their endowment. Experimental results show the non-trivial effects of inequality on cooperation, and discuss the extent to which evolutionary game theory models can account for these effects.
One landmark application of evolutionary game theory is the study of social dilemmas. This literature explores why people cooperate even when there are strong incentives to defect. Much of this literature, however, assumes that interactions are symmetric. Individuals are assumed to have the same strategic options and the same potential pay-offs. Yet many interesting questions arise once individuals are allowed to differ. Here, we study asymmetry in simple coordination games. In our set-up, human participants need to decide how much of their endowment to contribute to a public good. If a group's collective contribution reaches a pre-defined threshold, all group members receive a reward. To account for possible asymmetries, individuals either differ in their endowments or their productivities. According to a theoretical equilibrium analysis, such games tend to have many possible solutions. In equilibrium, group members may contribute the same amount, different amounts or nothing at all. According to our behavioural experiment, however, humans favour the equilibrium in which everyone contributes the same proportion of their endowment. We use these experimental results to highlight the non-trivial effects of inequality on cooperation, and we discuss to which extent models of evolutionary game theory can account for these effects.This article is part of the theme issue 'Half a century of evolutionary games: a synthesis of theory, application and future directions'.
作者
我是这篇论文的作者
点击您的名字以认领此论文并将其添加到您的个人资料中。
推荐
暂无数据