Decision, Uncertainty and Cooperation: A Behavioral Interpretation Based on Quantum Strategy

Abstract

This paper presents a new attempt to explore people’s cooperative behavior under the natural uncertainty in decision making process. The most recent development of quantum cognition creatively enriched the exploration to the endogenous uncertainty in human behavior by expanding the strategic space. In this paper we extend the quantum decision-making model to a two-player Prisoner’s dilemma game by bringing in the evolutional decision operators with quantum phases. These quantum phases, following uniform random distribution when the decisions are confined to individual decision-making process, will change according to the different levels of implied cooperative inclination, and lead to possible new Nash Equilibriums that emerge from a “hyper” decision space. We also bring in the Dissimilarity Index from complex network literature, to capture and measure the cooperative inclination between the players. Conditions of Quantum Nash Equilibrium are derived out from dynamic quantum equations under the Heisenberg Picture.