The Emergence of Cooperation among Egoists

TLDR

The emergence of cooperation among egoists is a key issue in political philosophy, international politics, and economic and social exchange, and the evolutionary approach is the most general because it considers all possible strategies. The article investigates the conditions under which cooperation can arise in a population of egoists lacking central authority. The authors formalize the problem as an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma with pairwise interactions and prove theorems establishing when no strategy outperforms the population average under Tit for Tat, the conditions for collective stability, and how cooperation can emerge from a small cluster of discriminators amid unconditional defectors. They report results from tournament, ecological, and evolutionary approaches, demonstrating that cooperation can arise under the derived conditions and that a small cluster of discriminating individuals can sustain cooperation even when others defect.

Abstract

This article investigates the conditions under which cooperation will emerge in a world of egoists without central authority. This problem plays an important role in such diverse fields as political philosophy, international politics, and economic and social exchange. The problem is formalized as an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma with pairwise interaction among a population of individuals. Results from three approaches are reported: the tournament approach, the ecological approach, and the evolutionary approach. The evolutionary approach is the most general since all possible strategies can be taken into account. A series of theorems is presented which show: (1) the conditions under which no strategy can do any better than the population average if the others are using the reciprocal cooperation strategy of TIT FOR TAT , (2) the necessary and sufficient conditions for a strategy to be collectively stable, and (3) how cooperation can emerge from a small cluster of discriminating individuals even when everyone else is using a strategy of unconditional defection.