Translucent players: Explaining cooperative behavior in social dilemmas

Abstract

In the last few decades, numerous experiments have shown that humans do not always behave so as to maximize their material payoff. Cooperative behavior when non-cooperation is a dominant strategy (with respect to the material payoffs) is particularly puzzling. Here we propose a novel approach to explain cooperation, assuming what Halpern and Pass (2013) call translucent players. Typically, players are assumed to be opaque, in the sense that a deviation by one player does not affect the strategies used by other players. But a player may believe that if he switches from one strategy to another, the fact that he chooses to switch may be visible to the other players. For example, if he chooses to defect in Prisoner's Dilemma, the other player may sense his guilt. We show that by assuming translucent players, we can recover many of the regularities observed in human behavior in well-studied games such as Prisoner's Dilemma, Traveler's Dilemma, Bertrand Competition, and the Public Goods game.consequently been proposed to explain deviations from the money-maximization paradigm. Some of them assume that players are boundedly rational and/or make mistakes in the computation of the expected utility of a strategy (

Grand Challenges in Social Physics: In Pursuit of Moral Behavior

“…Since cooperating is not individually optimal, cooperative behavior cannot evolve among self-interested individuals, unless other mechanisms are at play. Several mechanisms for the evolution of cooperation have been identified and studied, including kin selection [22], direct reciprocity [23], indirect reciprocity [24], social preferences [25][26][27][28], the internalization of social heuristics [29], translucency [30], cooperative equilibria [12,31,32], as well as many others.…”

Self-Interest, prosociality, and the moral cognition of markets: A comparative analysis of the Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations

“…Moral cognition moreover presents intriguing parallels with the mind wandering activity that is typical of the Default Mode Network, that is, the brain’s default pattern of activity (Bzdok et al, 2015). The idea that the impulsive, automatic neurobiological processes associated to emotion are a potential threat to rational decision-making that needs constant control and that has to be overtaken by slower, more reflective, cognitively-driven mental processes to guarantee an adaptive response to environmental conditions is increasingly at odds with our understanding of how human moral cognition is rooted in deep cortical mechanisms that provide a very complex and adaptively sophisticated regulation of our choice in social situations (Moll and De Oliveira-Souza, 2007), and with the increasingly recognized, key role of emotions in the reciprocal attunement of subjects engaging in prosocial interaction (Capraro and Halpern, 2019). In addition, emotions can provide a selective advantage by promoting the achievement of outcomes in strategic interactions that cannot be attained by purely rational and self-interested players, such as in situations involving commitment problems (Frank, 1993).…”

Cumulative advantage is a double-edge sword for cooperation

“…The issue of unequal resource allocation and social unfairness [15,16], which are important consequences of the Matthew effect, has received significant attention in the field of evolutionary cooperation, as evidenced by studies such as [17,18]. Of growing interest to scholars is the design of effective wealth distribution systems, since theoretical research has demonstrated their potential to address social dilemmas [19][20][21][22]. For example, the promotion of the common interest is evident when individuals are allowed to redistribute their contributions in accordance with their previous round earnings [23].…”