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Humans judge each other's actions, which at least partly functions to detect and deter cheating and to enable helpfulness in an indirect reciprocity fashion. However, most forms of judging do not only concern the action itself, but also the…
Commitment is a well-established mechanism for fostering cooperation in human society and multi-agent systems. However, existing research has predominantly focused on the commitment that neglects the freedom of players to abstain from an…
We study a system in which N agents have to decide between two strategies \theta_i (i \in 1... N), for defection or cooperation, when interacting with other n agents (either spatial neighbors or randomly chosen ones). After each round, they…
Direct reciprocity is a mechanism for the evolution of cooperation in repeated social interactions. According to this literature, individuals naturally learn to adopt conditionally cooperative strategies if they have multiple encounters…
Gallice and Monzon (2019) present a natural environment that sustains full cooperation in one-shot social dilemmas among a finite number of self-interested agents. They demonstrate that in a sequential public goods game, where agents lack…
In many social dilemmas, individuals tend to generate a situation with low payoffs instead of a system optimum ("tragedy of the commons"). Is the routing of traffic a similar problem? In order to address this question, we present…
In this paper, we consider the problem of estimating a potentially sensitive (individually stigmatizing) statistic on a population. In our model, individuals are concerned about their privacy, and experience some cost as a function of their…
One-shot anonymous unselfishness in economic games is commonly explained by social preferences, which assume that people care about the monetary payoffs of others. However, during the last ten years, research has shown that different types…
Information foraging connects optimal foraging theory in ecology with how humans search for information. The theory suggests that, following an information scent, the information seeker must optimize the tradeoff between exploration by…
Evolutionary game theory assumes that individuals maximize their benefits when choosing strategies. However, an alternative perspective proposes that individuals seek to maximize the benefits of others. To explore the relationship between…
We study sequential social learning with endogenous information acquisition when agents have a taste for nonconformity. Each agent observes predecessors' actions, chooses whether to acquire a private signal (and its precision), and then…
Understanding, predicting, and learning from other people's actions are fundamental human social-cognitive skills. Little is known about how and when we consider other's actions and outcomes when making our own decisions. We developed a…
Information about peers' performance is pervasive in workplaces, yet its effects on worker behavior are mixed. We show that a key reason is that workers differ in how they value such information. In a real-effort experiment with 793…
A growing body of work suggests that people are sensitive to moral framing in economic games involving prosociality, suggesting that people hold moral preferences for doing the "right thing". What gives rise to these preferences? Here, we…
Social learning is a powerful mechanism through which agents learn about the world from others. However, humans don't always choose to observe others, since social learning can carry time and cognitive resource costs. How do people balance…
In reinforcement learning episodes, the rewards and punishments are often non-deterministic, and there are invariably stochastic elements governing the underlying situation. Such stochastic elements are often numerous and cannot be known in…
Varying environmental conditions affect relations between interacting individuals in social dilemmas, thus affecting also the evolution of cooperation. Oftentimes these environmental variations are seasonal and can therefore be…
We study a sequential social learning model in which there is uncertainty about the informativeness of a common signal-generating process. Rational agents arrive in order and make decisions based on the past actions of others and their…
Humans display a tendency to pay more attention to bad outcomes, often in a disproportionate way relative to their statistical occurrence. They also display euphorism, as well as a preference for the current state of affairs (status quo…
This paper presents an experimental study to investigate the learning and decision making behavior of individuals in a human society. Social learning is used as the mathematical basis for modelling interaction of individuals that aim to…