Seminar Details
2015-10-13 (14:00) : Revenge, apology and forgiveness as essential mechanisms for sustainable cooperation in social dilemmas
At Euler building (A002)
Organized by Mathematical Engineering
Speaker :
Tom Lenaerts (ULB)
Abstract :
When starting a new collaborative endeavor, it pays to establish upfront how strongly your partner or partners plan to commit to the common goal and what compensation can be expected in case the collaboration is violated. Diverse examples in biological and social contexts have demonstrated the pervasiveness of making prior agreements on posterior compensations, suggesting that this behavior could have been shaped by natural selection. I will show using stochastic evolutionary dynamics that when the cost of arranging a commitment deal lies within certain limits, substantial levels of cooperation are attainable in the prisoners dilemma[1] and public goods games [2] . In addition I will show that behaviours like revenge, apology and forgiveness provide essential mechanisms for sustaining cooperation when long-term commitments fail in the Iterated Prisoners Dilemma [3]. The main conclusion from this work is that for apologies to work they need to be sincere as otherwise strategies emerge that lead to significantly reduced levels of cooperation.
[1] The Anh Han, Luis Moniz Pereira, Francisco C Santos and Tom Lenaerts (2013) Good agreements make good friends. Scientific Reports 3:2695.
[2] The Anh Han, Luis M Pereira and Tom Lenaerts (2015) Avoiding or restricting defectors in public goods games? Journal of the Royal Society Interface 12:20141203
[3] Luis A. Martinez-Vaquero, The Anh Han, Luís Moniz Pereira and Tom Lenaerts (2015) Apology and forgiveness evolve to resolve failures in cooperative agreements. Scientific Reports 5: 10639