Why do people cooperate?

Politics, Philosophy & Economics

Volumn 5, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 81-96

  Binmore, Ken ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

behavioral economics; fairness; game theory; natural justice; social norms

Indexed keywords

EID: 34247882225     PISSN: 1470594X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1470594X06060620     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. Ken Binmore, Natural Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
2. D. Munro, A Guide to the British Moralists (London: Collins, 1972).
3. R. Frank, Passions within Reason (New York: Norton, 1968).
4. D. Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).
5. C. Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1965).
6. K. Binmore, Game Theory and the Social Contract, Volume 1: Playing Fair (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).
7. USA Today, 8 April 2004.
8. Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr and Herbert Gintis, Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-Scale Societies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
9. J. Henrich et al., ‘“Economic Man” in Cross-Cultural Perspective’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2005).
10. There is a risk of confusion when the repeated play of a one-shot game is under discussion. The assumption is then that players never expect to interact with their current opponents again. Unlike the repeated games to which the folk theorem applies, selfish optimizers will then have no reason to worry about being punished tomorrow for failing to cooperate today.
11. J. Ledyard, ‘Public Goods: A Survey of Experimental Research’, in Handbook of Experimental Game Theory, edited by J. Kagel and A. Roth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); D. Sally, ‘Conversation and Cooperation in Social Dilemmas: A Meta-Analysis of Experiments from 1958 to 1992’, Rationality and Society 7 (1995): 58-92.
12. C. Camerer, Behavioral Game Theory: Experiments in Strategic Interaction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
13. Henrich et al., Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-Scale Societies, p. 433.
14. E. Fehr and K. Schmidt, ‘A Theory of Fairness, Competition and Cooperation’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 114 (1999): 817-68.
15. A. Shaked, ‘The Rhetoric of Inequity Aversion’, URL (2005): http://www.wiwwi.uni-bonn.de/shaked/rhetoric.
16. K. Binmore, J. McCarthy, G. Ponti, L. Samuelson and A. Shaked, ‘A Backward Induction Experiment’, Journal of Economic Theory 104 (2002): 48-88.
17. I say ‘retro-classical’ because Butlerians have abandoned the theory of revealed preference in favor of the Victorian view that people really do have utility functions in their heads.
18. K. Binmore, J. Gale and L. Samuelson, ‘Learning to be Imperfect: The Ultimatum Game’, Games and Economic Behavior 8 (1995): 56-90.
19. E. Fehr and S. Gächter, ‘Cooperation and Punishment in Public Goods Experiments’, American Economic Review 90 (2000): 980-94.
20. Learning is no problem for Butlerians when people learn to play as Butlerians would wish.
21. J. Steiner, ‘A Trace of Anger is Enough: On the Enforcement of Social Norms’, CERGE-EI working paper (Prague: CERGE-EI, 2004).
22. E. Fehr, S. Gächter and G. Kirchsteiger, ‘Reciprocity as a Contract Enforcement Device: Experimental Evidence’, Econometrica 65 (1997): 833-60.
23. P.J. Healy, ‘Group Reputations and Stereotypes as Contract Enforcement Devices’, Caltech working paper (Pasadena, CA: Caltech, 2004) reports similar final-round effects, not only in his own instructive gift-exchange experiment, but also in those of M. Rigdon, ‘Efficiency Wages in an Experimental Labor Market’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99 (2002): 13,348-51 and A. Riedl and J-R. Tyran, ‘Tax Liability Side Equivalence in Gift-Exchange Labor Markets’, Journal of Public Economics (2005 forthcoming).
24. M. Kandori, ‘Social Norms and Community Enforcement’, Review of Economic Studies 59 (1992): 63-80.
25. R. Selten and R. Stocker, ‘End Behavior in Finite Sequences of Prisoner's Dilemma Supergames: A Learning Theory Approach’, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 7 (1986): 47-70.
26. This need not be attributed to a genetic disposition to reciprocate. I think such folk are simply more heavily conditioned to observe the social norms of everyday life than the rest of us.
27. E. Fehr et al., ‘Reciprocity as a Contract Enforcement Device: Experimental Evidence’.
28. Such an employer will be a reciprocating robot whose high wage was not reciprocated with high effort.
29. R. Trivers, ‘The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism’, Quarterly Review of Biology 46 (1971): 35-56; R. Trivers, Social Evolution (Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin Cummings, 1985).
30. J. Maynard Smith and G. Price, ‘The Logic of Animal Conflict’, Nature 246 (1972): 15-18.
31. K. Binmore and L. Samuelson, ‘Evolutionary Stability in Repeated Games Played by Finite Automata’, Journal of Economic Theory 57 (1992): 278-305.
32. I do not argue that the use of the original position requires Adam and Eve to imagine bargaining directly behind the veil of ignorance, but that evolution will generate an outcome as if they had bargained directly.
33. Binmore, Game Theory and the Social Contract, Volume 1: Playing Fair.
34. R. Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
35. K. Binmore, Game Theory and the Social Contract, Volume 2: Just Playing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
36. J. Alcock, The Triumph of Sociobiology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
37. G. Wagstaff, An Integrated Psychological and Philosophical Approach to Justice (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001).