Abstract
Humans routinely engage in many distinct interactions in parallel. Team members collaborate on several concurrent projects, and even whole nations interact with each other across a variety of issues, including trade, climate change and security. Yet the existing theory of direct reciprocity studies isolated repeated games. Such models cannot account for strategic attempts to use the vested interests in one game as a leverage to enforce cooperation in another. Here we introduce a general framework of multichannel games. Individuals interact with each other over multiple channels; each channel is a repeated game. Strategic choices in one channel can affect decisions in another. With analytical equilibrium calculations for the donation game and evolutionary simulations for several other games we show that such linkage facilitates cooperation. Our results suggest that previous studies tend to underestimate the human potential for reciprocity. When several interactions occur in parallel, people often learn to coordinate their behavior across games to maximize cooperation in each of them.
Highlights
Humans routinely engage in many distinct interactions in parallel
By conditioning behavior in one game on what happened in another, individuals can increase their bargaining power[34]. This added leverage can be used to force cooperative behaviors even in those games in which cooperation is difficult to sustain. To capture such strategic spillovers between distinct interactions, we introduce an evolutionary framework for multichannel games (Fig. 1)
In Supplementary Note 4, we prove that Cooperate if Coordinated (CIC) can establish full cooperation under conditions where Win-Stay Lose-Shift (WSLS) fails
Summary
Humans routinely engage in many distinct interactions in parallel. Team members collaborate on several concurrent projects, and even whole nations interact with each other across a variety of issues, including trade, climate change and security. This added leverage can be used to force cooperative behaviors even in those games in which cooperation is difficult to sustain To capture such strategic spillovers between distinct interactions, we introduce an evolutionary framework for multichannel games (Fig. 1). The previous evolutionary literature has shown that remarkable dynamical effects can already occur when two or more oneshot (non-repeated) games are coupled[35,36,37,38] This literature suggests that people find it more difficult to coordinate on an equilibrium when they interact in several games simultaneously. Our evolutionary findings suggest that individuals quickly learn to coordinate their own behaviors across different social dilemmas They tend to use cooperation in more valuable interactions as a means to promote cooperation in those games with a larger temptation to defect. Individuals often evolve to be more cooperative in all games, including a
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