Cooperation in two-player social dilemmas with other-regarding orientations

Abstract

We present a unified description of the influence of other-regarding orientations (ORO) on the evolution of cooperation and social tensions in all basic classes of two-person social dilemmas. We provide analytical conditions for which two types of ORO, the minimum payoff orientation and the total payoff orientation lead to full cooperation between players. It turns out that in many popular social dilemmas both types of ORO are necessary to promote cooperation, and the minimum payoff orientation may have advantage over the total payoff orientation. Moreover, ORO can be more effective in fostering cooperation in more challenging social dilemmas. For the dilemma games for which the initial and modified through ORO payoff matrices have mixed Nash equilibria we prove that ORO fosters cooperation. Once a real life situation is identified as a particular type of social dilemma in which the pro-social behavior is determined by material payoffs, our results determine the choice of the type and of the intensity of ORO necessary to foster cooperation and to erase social tensions between players.