How We Cooperate, John E. Roemer. Yale University Press, 2019, 248 pages.

Abstract

The newspapers are filled with headlines about R numbers, excess mortality, and saving the economy versus saving lives. [...]Roemer’s agents want to do the right thing, provided that they expect that others will act in a like manner. Roemer uses a variant of the game where the players get a strictly positive utility if they go to their preferred event alone, though less than they would get from going to either event together (see Fig. 2b). [...]Roemer shows that the mixed-strategy SKE (where the players assign each strategy a strictly positive probability and then randomize over them according to those probabilities) strictly dominates the mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium, basically because the Kantian optimizers are willing to compromise more and go to the other player’s preferred activity with a higher probability.