Related papers: Diversity and Collective Action
The fact that humans cooperate with non-kin in large groups, or with people they will never meet again, is a long-standing evolutionary puzzle with profound implications. Cooperation is linked to altruism, the capacity to perform costly…
In modern interconnected societies, opinions and beliefs can quickly spread across large populations, giving rise to collective behaviors such as the adoption of social norms or polarization. These phenomena have motivated many models aimed…
We model a dynamic public good contribution game, where players are (naturally) formed into groups. The groups are exogenously placed in a sequence, with limited information available to players about their groups' position in the sequence.…
The emergence of cooperation in the groups of interacting agents is one of the most fascinating phenomena observed in many complex systems studied in social science and ecology, even in the situations where one would expect the agent to use…
Understanding cooperation in social systems is challenging because the ever-changing rules that govern societies interact with individual actions, resulting in intricate collective outcomes. In virtual-world experiments, we allowed people…
Societies change through time, entailing changes in behaviors and institutions. We ask how social change occurs when behaviors and institutions are interdependent. We model a group-structured society in which the transmission of individual…
Decisions are often made by heterogeneous groups of individuals, each with distinct initial biases and access to information of different quality. We show that in large groups of independent agents who accumulate evidence the first to…
In action domains where agents may have erroneous beliefs, reasoning about the effects of actions involves reasoning about belief change. In this paper, we use a transition system approach to reason about the evolution of an agents beliefs…
Whether or not to change strategy depends not only on the personal success of each individual, but also on the success of others. Using this as motivation, we study the evolution of cooperation in games that describe social dilemmas, where…
We introduce a minimal model of multilevel selection on structured populations, considering the interplay between game theory and population dynamics. Through a bottleneck process, finite groups are formed with cooperators and defectors…
If you search for 'collective behaviour' with your web browser most of the texts popping up will be about group activities of humans, including riots, fashion and mass panic. Nevertheless, collective behaviour is also considered to be an…
Evolutionary games provide the theoretical backbone for many aspects of our social life: from cooperation to crime, from climate inaction to imperfect vaccination and epidemic spreading, from antibiotics overuse to biodiversity…
Complex systems show the capacity to aggregate information and to display coordinated activity. In the case of social systems the interaction of different individuals leads to the emergence of norms, trends in political positions, opinions,…
Given that data-dependent algorithmic systems have become impactful in more domains of life, the need for individuals to promote their own interests and hold algorithms accountable has grown. To have meaningful influence, individuals must…
Cooperation is beneficial for the species as a whole, but, at the level of an individual, defection pays off. Natural selection is then expected to favor defectors and eliminate cooperation. This prediction is in stark contrast with the…
According to Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan [1651; 2008 (Touchstone, New York), English Ed], "the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," and it would need powerful social institutions to establish social order. In reality,…
In the traditional setup of public goods game all players are involved in every available groups and the mutual benefit is shared among competing cooperator and defector strategies. But in real life situations the group formation of players…
Human social dilemmas are often shaped by actions involving uncertain goals and returns that may only be achieved in the future. Climate action, voluntary vaccination and other prospective choices stand as paramount examples of this…
Counterfactual Thinking is a human cognitive ability studied in a wide variety of domains. It captures the process of reasoning about a past event that did not occur, namely what would have happened had this event occurred, or, otherwise,…
Living in groups brings benefits to many animals, such as a protection against predators and an improved capacity for sensing and making decisions while searching for resources in uncertain environments. A body of studies has shown how…