A Model of Human Cooperation in Social Dilemmas
Valerio Capraro

TL;DR
This paper introduces a new predictive model of human cooperation in social dilemmas, emphasizing innate cooperative attitudes and coalition forecasting, which better explains experimental results than traditional models.
Contribution
It proposes the first model where humans forecast coalition outcomes and act optimistically, improving prediction of cooperation in social dilemmas beyond standard economic assumptions.
Findings
Model accurately predicts population average behavior in one-shot dilemmas.
Explains experimental findings not accounted for by traditional models.
Highlights innate human tendency to cooperate based on optimistic coalition forecasts.
Abstract
Social dilemmas are situations in which collective interests are at odds with private interests: pollution, depletion of natural resources, and intergroup conflicts, are at their core social dilemmas. Because of their multidisciplinarity and their importance, social dilemmas have been studied by economists, biologists, psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists. These studies typically explain tendency to cooperation by dividing people in proself and prosocial types, or appealing to forms of external control or, in iterated social dilemmas, to long-term strategies. But recent experiments have shown that cooperation is possible even in one-shot social dilemmas without forms of external control and the rate of cooperation typically depends on the payoffs. This makes impossible a predictive division between proself and prosocial people and proves that people have attitude to…
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