Faith and love in the prisoner's dilemma

The well-known prisoner's dilemma shows why cooperation may be difficult to achieve even when cooperation would create value for all partners. In particular, material interests conflict because reciprocity cannot be enforced, while agents give priority to their material self-interest. This paper introduces a model of human motivation based on faith and love, and shows how these motivations transform the prisoner's dilemma into a stag hunt game with a cooperative and a non-cooperative equilibrium.