Uncertainty and the Evolution of Cooperation

It is well known that inferential errors can induce nice but provocable strategies to engage in vendettas with each other. It is therefore generally believed that imperfect monitoring reduces the payoffs of such strategies and impairs the evolution of cooperation. The current literature, however, on...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Journal of conflict resolution Vol. 37; no. 4; pp. 709 - 734
Main Author Bendor, Jonathan
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published 2455 Teller Road, Thousand Oaks, CA 91320 Sage Publications 01.12.1993
SAGE Publications
University of Michigan, Department of Journalism
SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
Subjects
Accidents
Behavior
Conflict Resolution
Cooperation
Determinism
Ecological genetics
Ecological invasion
Environmental assessment
Intuition
Negotiations
Population ecology
Prisoner's dilemma
Prisoners dilemma
Risk
Social evolution
Uncertainty
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Summary:It is well known that inferential errors can induce nice but provocable strategies to engage in vendettas with each other. It is therefore generally believed that imperfect monitoring reduces the payoffs of such strategies and impairs the evolution of cooperation. The current literature, however, only scrutinizes specific strategies, either analytically or in particular tournaments. This article examines in a more general way how monitoring uncertainty affects the fate of cooperation in tournaments of the iterated prisoner's dilemma (IPD). The first set of results shows that imperfect monitoring does create a sharp trade-off between cooperativeness and unexploitability. The second set examines how random shocks affect the tournament payoffs of several large classes of strategies in the IPD, and shows how noise can help certain nice strategies. The third set analyzes how imperfect monitoring can facilitate the emergence of cooperation based on a population of non-nice strategies. Thus the idea that inferential uncertainty always harms nice strategies and always impairs the evolution of cooperation must be sharply qualified.
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ISSN:0022-0027
1552-8766
DOI:10.1177/0022002793037004007