Excerpt

The mathematical theory on cooperation can be traced to foundational research on pure strategy games by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern and mixed strategies by John F. Nash, Jr. Although not focusing on cooperation per se, this work introduced important concepts and tools for the disciplines of behavioral economics and evolutionary biology that would become the seeds of cooperation theory. Specifically, the posing of the prisoner’s dilemma (PD) in 1950 was a springboard for scientific inquiry into why individual agents cooperate. PD says barring any information beyond payoffs of the game and knowledge that it is only played once, the best response is to avoid a sucker’s payoff—that is, not risking giving without receiving. Mutual defection as a unique evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) in the PD game posed a challenge to discover the additional ingredients for a cooperative ESS. Other one-shot coordination games (e.g., the Stag Hunt) can yield multiple Nash equilibria, including cooperative outcomes, but these emerge from incentives contained within the payoff matrix.

More than a decade after key developments in game theory, plausible scenarios and formal theories were advanced to explain cooperation as a product of evolution. In 1962 V. C. Wynne Edwards proposed that many social behaviors, including altruism, were favored by natural selection for the benefit of the group. His theory was discredited and impeded the acceptance of what was to be a coherent theory of multilevel selection, since the latter was based in part on group-level traits. In parallel to group selection theory, a new theory based on gene selection was proposed in 1964 by William D. Hamilton, a mathematical biologist and remarkable naturalist. Drawing on work by Fisher, Haldane, and Wright dating back to the 1930s, Hamilton proposed a rule for the evolution of altruism based on kin selection. Almost a decade after Hamilton, Robert Trivers (1971), an evolutionary biologist conducting his thesis on parental investment and the evolution of altruism, temporalized game theory to multiple rounds to show how distantly or unrelated individuals who reciprocate helping behaviors could maintain cooperation in the face of defection.

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