Utilitarianism and Co-operation

Regan, Donald H.

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198246091.001.0001

Cited by 387 publications

(45 citation statements)

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“…Some of the ideas behind these theories can be traced back to Gilbert (1987Gilbert ( , 1989Gilbert ( , 1990; Hurley (1989Hurley ( , 1991; before them, Regan (1980); Gauthier (1975); and according to some authorities, originally, Hodgson (1967). Similar or at least closely related ideas have been suggested by Casajus (2001); Janssen (2001Janssen ( , 2006; Heath, Ho, and Berger (2006); Tuomela (2007Tuomela ( , 2009and Smerilli (2012).…”

Section: Team Reasoningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Team reasoning: Solving the puzzle of coordination

Colman

Gold

2017

Psychon Bull Rev

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In many everyday activities, individuals have a common interest in coordinating their actions. Orthodox game theory cannot explain such intuitively obvious forms of coordination as the selection of an outcome that is best for all in a common-interest game. Theories of team reasoning provide a convincing solution by proposing that people are sometimes motivated to maximize the collective payoff of a group and that they adopt a distinctive mode of reasoning from preferences to decisions. This also offers a compelling explanation of cooperation in social dilemmas. A review of team reasoning and related theories suggests how team reasoning could be incorporated into psychological theories of group identification and social value orientation theory to provide a deeper understanding of these phenomena.Keywords Common knowledge . Cooperation . Coordination . Game theory . Group identification . Social dilemma . Social value orientation . Team reasoning Near the end of the 1960 movie Spartacus, directed by Stanley Kubrick, a Roman general addresses a group of slaves who have been captured after rising up in revolt, offering to spare them and return them to slavery if they identify their leader, Spartacus. To save his comrades, Spartacus (played by Kirk Douglas) rises to his feet and declares: BI am Spartacus.^Immediately and without any discussion among themselves, the other slaves stand up one by one, also claiming BI am Spartacus,^thereby preventing the Roman general from singling out their leader or anyone else for special punishment. This is a dramatic example of coordination, one of the most fundamental processes of social interaction, manifested whenever two or more individuals try to align their actions with one another in order to achieve a common goal.Coordination is an elementary form of cooperation, relatively neglected by researchers, perhaps partly because it is so familiar and commonplace, but it is beginning to attract attention (e.g., Thomas, Scioli, Haque, & Pinker, 2014). Surprisingly, because it seems so simple and obvious, it turns out to be inexplicable by orthodox game theory, a highly developed theory designed precisely to explain interactive decision making. Coordination thus appears to be a classic example of the type of phenomenon referred to by Heider (1958), in which Bthe veil of obviousness that makes so many insights of intuitive psychology invisible to our scientific eye has to be pierced( p. 7). In this article, we show how theories of team reasoning solve this problem convincingly and also provide a compelling explanation for cooperation in social dilemmas. We review the literature on team reasoning, including theoretical issues and experimental evidence, and, for the sake of balance and completeness, we discuss more briefly the principal competing theories of coordination and related theories of social psychology. We show how certain psychological theories could be strengthened significantly by incorporating team reasoning. Before going into details about these issues, it is ne...

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Section: Team Reasoningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Team reasoning: Solving the puzzle of coordination

Colman

Gold

2017

Psychon Bull Rev

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“…Orthodox decision theory may be considered a special case in which the group happens to be a singleton. The underlying idea of team reasoning can be traced back to Regan (1980) and ultimately to Hodgson (1967).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Collective rationality in interactive decisions: Evidence for team reasoning

2008

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Decision theory and game theory rest on a fundamental assumption that players seek to maximize their individual utilities, but in some interactive decisions it seems intuitively reasonable to aim to maximize the utility of the group of players as a whole. Such team reasoning requires collective preferences and a distinctive mode of reasoning from preferences to decisions. Findings from two experiments provide evidence for collective preferences and team reasoning. In lifelike vignettes (Experiment 1) and abstract games (Experiment 2) with certain structural properties, most players preferred team-reasoning strategies to strategies supporting unique Nash equilibria, although individually rational players should choose equilibrium strategies. These findings suggest that team reasoning predicts strategy choices more powerfully than orthodox game theory in some games.

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“…This sort of problem is well known from rule-utilitarianism: given that, realistically, a certain fraction of the population will act immorally, what rule should the moral person comply with? Donald Regan (1980) presents "cooperative utilitarianism" as a solution to the problem. This in turn serves Bacharach as a model for the solution of his problem in his theory of "circumspect team reasoning" (Bacharach, 2006, 130ff;Gold and Sugden, 2007, 131).…”

Section: Instrumental Rationality and Opportunismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Team Reasoning as a Guide to Coordination

Lahno¹,

Lahno²

2018

Revue d'Économie Politique

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A particular problem of traditional Rational Choice Theory is that it cannot explain equilibrium selection in simple coordination games. In this paper we analyze and discuss the solution concept for common coordination problems as incorporated in the theory of Team Reasoning (TR). Special consideration is given to TR's concept of opportunistic choice and to the resulting restrictions in using private information. We report results from a laboratory experiment in which teams were given a chance to coordinate on a particular pattern of behavior in a sequence of HiLo games. A modification of the stage game offered opportunities to improve on the team goal through changing this accustomed pattern of behavior. Our observations throw considerable doubt on the idea of opportunistic team reasoning as a guide to coordination. Contrary to what TR would predict, individuals tend to stick to accustomed behavioral patterns. Moreover, we find that individual decisions are at least partly determined by private information not accessible to all members of a team. Alternative theories of choice, in particular cognitive hierarchy theory may be more suitable to explain the observed pattern of behavior.JEL codes: C91, C92, D03, D70.

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Utilitarianism and Co-operation

Cited by 387 publications

References 0 publications

Team reasoning: Solving the puzzle of coordination

Team reasoning: Solving the puzzle of coordination

Collective rationality in interactive decisions: Evidence for team reasoning

Team Reasoning as a Guide to Coordination

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