To cooperate or to defect? Altruism and reputation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new cooperation model driven by altruism and reputation, where players' willingness to cooperate depends on their altruism and their co-player's reputation, independent of payoffs.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach where altruism and reputation determine cooperation, differing from traditional payoff-based models, and analyzes its effectiveness in fully connected networks.

Findings

Players with positive altruism tend to cooperate and meet cooperation.

The mechanism is most effective in fully connected networks.

Payoffs are not a factor in this cooperation model.

Abstract

The basic problem in the cooperation theory is to justify the cooperation. Here we propose a new approach, where players are driven by their altruism to cooperate or not. The probability of cooperation depends also on the co-player's reputation. We find that players with positive altruism cooperate and met cooperation. In this approach, payoffs are not relevant. The mechanism is most efficient in the fully connected network.