The Evolution of Cooperation: How Patience Matters

Abstract

The evolution of cooperation has been the focus of much attention from evolutionary game theorists. Of course, conventional game theorists often cite the Folk Theorem to suggest that cooperation is very likely as long as people are patient. However, experimental and real world evidence of the Folk Theorem has been sparse. We investigate whether cooperation can evolve endogenously in a population where people have different patience levels. We motivate our model by asking the following question: why don’t biologists cooperate with each other by contributing to biological databases? We apply the Folk theorem from conventional game theory and assume that patient people cooperate while impatient people do not. Further, we allow people to be heterogenous in the patience trait. We then show, using evolutionary game theory, how patience may matter in the evolution of cooperation. Computer simulations check for the robustness of our results. We suggest therefore that experimental evidence for the Folk theorem has been scarce because these experiments ignore patience endogeneity.