Living organisms expend energy to sustain survival, a process which is reliant on consuming resources - termed here as the "cost of survival". In the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD), a classic model of social interaction, individual payoffs depend on choices to either provide benefits to others at a...

This paper studies how competition between groups affects cooperation. In the control condition, pairs of subjects play an indefinitely repeated Prisoner's Dilemma game without external competition. In the treatment, two pairs compete against each other. No monetary rewards are tied to winning,...

Human cooperation is ubiquitous and instinctive. We are among the most cooperative species on Earth. Still, research mostly focuses on why we cooperate, instead of understanding why some of us do not do so. The public goods game can be used to map human cooperation as well as to study free...

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...

Do large language models (LLMs) - such as ChatGPT 3.5, ChatGPT 4.0, and Google's Gemini 1.0 Pro - simulate human behavior in the context of the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) game with varying stake sizes? This paper investigates this question, examining how LLMs navigate scenarios where...

The prisoner's dilemma (PD) is arguably the most important model of social dilemmas, but our knowledge about how a PD's material payoff structure affects cooperation is incomplete. In this paper we investigate the effect of variation in material payoffs on cooperation, focusing on one-shot PD...

An economic interpretation of Epictetus's precept of 'Taking away aversion from all things not in our power' consists of extending the do- main of indifference beyond its boundaries under non-ethical preferences, so as to yield indifference between outcomes differing only on things out- side...

Social interactions predominantly take place under the shadow of the future. Previous literature explains cooperation in indefinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma as predominantly driven by self-interested strategic considerations. This paper provides a causal test of the importance of social...

We consider collective decision-making when society consists of groups endowed with voting weights. Each group chooses an internal rule that specifies the allocation of its weight to alternatives as a function of its members' preferences. Under fairly general conditions, we show that the...

Social interactions predominantly take place under the shadow of the future. Previous literature explains cooperation in indefinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma as predominantly driven by self-interested strategic considerations. This paper provides a causal test of the importance of social...

This paper studies how competition between groups affects cooperation. In the control condition, pairs of subjects play an indefinitely repeated Prisoner's Dilemma game without external competition. In the treatment, two pairs compete against each other. No monetary rewards are tied to winning,...

Gallice and Monzón (2019) present a natural environment that sustains full cooperation in one-shot social dilemmas among a finite number of self-interested agents. They demonstrate that in a sequential public goods game, where agents lack knowledge of their position in the sequence but can...

Interrelated global crises - climate change, pandemics, loss of ecosystem services and biodiversity - pose risks that demand collective solutions. Uncertainty about others' behavior, coupled with the dependence on some to take collective efforts to mitigate risks for all (e.g. conservation of...

We characterize 'Games of Altruistic Cooperation' as a class of games in which cooperation leaves the individual and the group of decision-makers worse off than defection, but favors individuals outside the group. An example is climate change mitigation. In this context, we experimentally...

Experiment participants in a social dilemma game choose cooperation over defection, even though neither is more beneficial. High levels of cooperation cannot be explained by favorable labels for actions, collusion, k-level reasoning, quantal response behavior, or misplaced optimism about others'...

We examine how conditional cooperation is related to the material payoffs in a Sequential Prisoner's Dilemma experiment. We have subjects play eight SPDs with varying payoffs, systematically varying the material gain to the second-mover and the material loss to the first-mover when the...

We investigate the welfare effect of increasing competition in an anonymous two-sided matching market, where matched pairs play an infinitely repeated Prisoner's Dilemma. Higher matching efficiency is usually considered detrimental as it creates stronger incentives for defection. We point out,...

We investigate the welfare effect of increasing competition in an anonymous two-sided matching market, where matched pairs play an infinitely repeated Prisoner's Dilemma. Higher matching efficiency is usually considered detrimental as it creates stronger incentives for defection. We point out,...

The prisoner's dilemma (PD) is arguably the most important model of social dilemmas, but our knowledge about how a PD's material payoff structure affects cooperation is incomplete. In this paper we investigate the effect of variation in material payoffs on cooperation, focusing on one-shot PD...

Do large language models (LLMs)—such as ChatGPT 3.5, ChatGPT 4.0, and Google's Gemini 1.0 Pro—simulate human behavior in the context of the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) game with varying stake sizes? This paper investigates this question, examining how LLMs navigate scenarios where...