Reciprocity and the Social Contract

Politics, Philosophy & Economics

Volumn 3, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 5-35

  Binmore, Ken ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

altruism; authority; equilibrium; evolutionary stability; folk theorem; game theory; reciprocity; responsibility; trust

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248054416     PISSN: 1470594X     EISSN: 17413060     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1470594X04039981     Document Type: Article

References (16)

1. John Mackie, Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).
2. E. Westermark, The Origin and Development of Moral Ideas (London: Stoughton, 1906).
3. J. Von Neumann and O. Morgenstern, The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944).
4. Ken Binmore, Playing Fair: Game Theory and the Social Contract I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); Just Playing: Game Theory and the Social Contract II (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
5. This present article is drawn from chapters three and four of Natural Justice at the invitation of the editors.
6. The common response that Alice would not behave like this is silly. If Alice would choose dove in this situation, then we would have to write the largest payoff in the top cell. But then the game would not be the Prisoners’ Dilemma any more.
7. W. Hamilton, ‘The Genetic Evolution of Social Behavior’, Parts I and II, Journal of Theoretical Biology 37 (1964): 52.
8. R. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
9. For a highly professional survey of the experimental literature on the private provision of public goods, see John Ledyard, ‘Public Goods: A Survey of Experimental Research’, in Handbook of Experimental Economics, edited by J. Kagel and A. Roth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
10. In the Prisoners’ Dilemma, hawk strongly dominates dove. This means that a player always gets strictly more by playing hawk rather than dove. Nobody objects to the iterated deletion of strongly dominated strategies, but then one can never delete a Nash equilibrium along the way.
11. D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd edn., edited by L.A. Selby Biggs, revised by P. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978 [1788]).
12. R. Trivers, ‘The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism’, Quarterly Review of Biology 46 (1971): 35-56.
13. R. Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
14. Von Neumann's theorem implies that the players’ maximin payoffs sum to zero in a two-person, zero-sum game. It is therefore a Nash equilibrium for both to use their maximin strategies, because neither can hope for more if the other player does the same.
15. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature.
16. J. Tooby and I. Cosmides, ‘Friendship, Cooperation and the Banker's Paradox’, in Evolution of Social Behavior Patterns in Primates and Man, edited by J. Maynard Smith (London: Proceedings of the British Academy, 1996).