Cost Of Cooperation Research Articles

Valuing rewards to others in a prisoner's dilemma game

People value rewards to others but discount those rewards based on social distance; rewards to a socially closer person are valued more than identical rewards to a socially more distant person (Jones and Rachlin, 2006). The concept of social discounting can explain cooperation and defection in two-player prisoner's dilemma (PD) games (Axelrod, 1980). The contingencies of a PD game are such that in any single game cooperation is costly to each player herself but beneficial to the other player. From the viewpoint of each player, the costs of cooperation are fully realized, but the benefits of cooperation are discounted by the social distance to the other player. The present experiment measured cooperation and defection in two PD-game conditions with differing reward magnitudes. In one (the 1-2-3-4 condition), the cost of cooperation exceeded its socially discounted benefit, and players were predicted to defect; in the other (the 1-2-9-10 condition), the discounted benefit of cooperation exceeded its cost, and players were predicted to cooperate. Over the course of repeated trials defection increased with the 1-2-3-4 condition but not with the 1-2-9-10 condition. Moreover, participants who rated their partners as closer, relative to random classmates, cooperated at higher rates – consistent with social discounting.

Using DEA to find the best partner for a horizontal cooperation

In this paper Data Envelopment Analysis is used to select among different potential partners to form a joint venture which is the one that best fits the strategic goal of a horizontal cooperation. Since each potential partner has a different technology the one whose technology better complements ours is the one that will bring the greatest synergy to the technology of the joint venture. Models for the cases that the joint venture is planning to open one or several facilities are presented. A priori and ex-post measures of synergy between the partners are proposed. Also, a simple way of sharing the costs of the horizontal cooperation based on cooperative game theory is presented. The proposed approach is quite flexible and can be extended to include multiple-partner joint ventures as well as a multi-period planning horizon.

Perception without self-matching in conditional tag based cooperation

We consider a model for the evolution of cooperation in a population where individuals may have one of a number of different heritable and distinguishable markers or tags. Individuals interact with each of their neighbors on a square lattice by either cooperating by donating some benefit at a cost to themselves or defecting by doing nothing. The decision to cooperate or defect is contingent on each individual's perception of its interacting partner's tag. Unlike in other tag-based models individuals do not compare their own tag to that of their interaction partner. That is, there is no self-matching. When perception is perfect the cooperation rate is substantially higher than in the usual spatial prisoner's dilemma game when the cost of cooperation is high. The enhancement in cooperation is positively correlated with the number of different tags. The more diverse a population is the more cooperative it becomes. When individuals start with an inability to perceive tags the population evolves to a state where individuals gain at least partial perception. With some reproduction mechanisms perfect perception evolves, but with others the ability to perceive tags is imperfect. We find that perception of tags evolves to lower levels when the cost of cooperation is higher.

Mobility, fitness collection, and the breakdown of cooperation

The spatial arrangement of individuals is thought to overcome the dilemma of cooperation: When cooperators engage in clusters, they might share the benefit of cooperation while being more protected against noncooperating individuals, who benefit from cooperation but save the cost of cooperation. This is paradigmatically shown by the spatial prisoner's dilemma model. Here, we study this model in one and two spatial dimensions, but explicitly take into account that in biological setups, fitness collection and selection are separated processes occurring mostly on vastly different time scales. This separation is particularly important to understand the impact of mobility on the evolution of cooperation. We find that even small diffusive mobility strongly restricts cooperation since it enables noncooperative individuals to invade cooperative clusters. Thus, in most biological scenarios, where the mobility of competing individuals is an irrefutable fact, the spatial prisoner's dilemma alone cannot explain stable cooperation, but additional mechanisms are necessary for spatial structure to promote the evolution of cooperation. The breakdown of cooperation is analyzed in detail. We confirm the existence of a phase transition, here controlled by mobility and costs, which distinguishes between purely cooperative and noncooperative absorbing states. While in one dimension the model is in the class of the voter model, it belongs to the directed percolation universality class in two dimensions.

Cooperative differential game model based on trade-off between energy and delay for wireless sensor networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of a large number of unattended sensors with limited storage, battery power, computation, and communication capabilities, where battery power (or energy) is the most crucial resource for sensor nodes. The information sensed by sensors needs to be transmitted to sink quickly especially for the applications with delay restriction. However, it is difficult to achieve optimal energy efficiency and source-to-sink delay simultaneously. So it is very necessary to find a power control solution based tradeoff between energy and delay. In this paper, a cooperative differential game model is proposed, and a power solution is obtained which determines a fair distribution of the total cooperative cost among sources.

Increased Costs of Cooperation Help Cooperators in the Long Run

It has long been proposed that cooperation should increase in harsh environments, but this claim still lacks theoretical underpinnings. We modeled a scenario in which benefiting from altruistic behavior was essential to survival and reproduction. We used a spatial agent-based model to represent mutual cooperation enforced by environmental adversity. We studied two factors, the cost of unreciprocated cooperation and the environmental cost of living, which highlight a conflict between the short- and long-term rewards of cooperation. In the long run, cooperation is favored because only groups with a sufficient number of cooperators will survive. In the short run, however, harsh environmental costs increase the advantage of defectors in cooperator-defector interactions because the loss of resources leads to death. Our analysis sheds new light on the evolution of cooperation via interdependence and illustrates how selfish groups can incur short-term benefits at the cost of their eventual demise. We demonstrate how harsh environments select for cooperative phenotypes and suggest an explanation for the adoption of cooperative breeding strategies in human evolution. We also highlight the importance of variable population size and the role of socio-spatial organization in harsh environments.

Cooperative interval games: Mountain situations with interval data

In this paper, we extend mountain situations by using interval calculus. We define the interval Bird allocation and show that this allocation is a special core element of the interval cost game corresponding to an interval mountain situation. We deal with the interval cost sharing problem by introducing the cooperative interval cost game. Further, we consider a subset of the interval core of the related interval cost game. Each element of this set is extendable to a population monotonic interval allocation scheme or shortly pmias. Finally, we show that each interval core element of an interval connection game is extendable to bi-monotonic interval allocation scheme or shortly bi-mias.

Order Monotonic Solutions for Generalized Characteristic Functions

Generalized characteristic functions extend characteristic functions of 'classical' TU-games by assigning a real number to every ordered coalition being a permutation of any subset of the player set. Such generalized characteristic functions can be applied when the earnings or costs of cooperation among a set of players depends on the order in which the players enter a coalition. In the literature, the two main solutions for generalized characteristic functions are the one of Nowak and Radzik (1994), shortly called NR-value, and the one introduced by Sanchez and Bergantinos (1997), shortly called SB-value. In this paper, we introduce the axiom of order monotonicity with respect to the order of the players in a unanimity coalition, requiring that players who enter earlier should get not more in the corresponding (ordered) unanimity game than players who enter later. We propose several classes of order monotonic solutions for generalized characteristic functions that contain the NR-value and SB-value as special (extreme) cases. We also provide axiomatizations of these classes.

Domestic Politics and International Bargaining in China’s Territorial Disputes

Domestic Politics and International Bargaining in China's Territorial Disputes. By Chien-Peng Chung. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge-Curzon, 2004. Soflcover: 222pp. In 2006, as a first year Ph.D. student, I swallowed hard and clicked on the purchase icon at a popular online bookseller. The $150 price tag was worth it, I told myself. I was going to write a dissertation about Chinese territorial and Chung's book would be useful. As it turns out it was, and remains, invaluable. While it is rare to review books nine years after publication, the release of the paperback version of Chung's treatise on the domestic politics of China's territorial merits discussion as to whether the next generation of students of Chinese foreign policy should spend considerably less on the paperback version. In light of developments in the South and East China Seas in recent years, does Chung's model--based on Robert Putnam's two-level games framework --still explain Chinese behaviour towards its territorial disputes? Chung argues that, consistent with Putnam's expectations, bargaining outcomes are shaped by societal preferences and government coalitions, the ratification procedures of political institutions and the strategies of the negotiators, which affect bargaining outcomes in China's territorial (p. 145). Chung contrasts the recurrent bargaining failures in the East China Sea, with successful bargaining with Russia over the Zhaobao/Damansky border area. Territorial with India and over the South China were quieted at the time of writing and thus fall somewhere in between (p. 145). The cases studies confirm the expectation that domestic factors, such as the diffusion of the costs of cooperation across different constituencies, regime type, and the impact of coherent domestic opposition to an agreement can affect bargaining outcomes over territorial issues. Importantly, these findings remain relevant in China's two outstanding maritime disputes, over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands with Japan and with several other claimants in the South China Sea. Chung observes that the impact of particularly negative historical memories can be sufficiently strong so as to prevent official negotiations from even taking place (p. 147), a fact overlooked by Putnam's original theory. Chung's work also pre-empts recent work on public opinion and Chinese foreign policy by asking the question whether democracies are responsive to public opinion than their authoritarian counterparts. In a particularly prescient comment, due to the developing pluralism in the Chinese foreign policymaking process, it will be more difficult in future to coordinate the making and execution of foreign policy in China, especially with regard to sensitive issues like territorial disputes (pp. 150-151, emphasis added). This insight precedes detailed work on domestic sources of Chinese policy on the South China by the International Crisis Group's Stirring Up the South China Sea published in 2012. Indeed, Chung's framework is a useful prism through which to view bargaining over territory by other states as well. For example, the Joint Marine Seismic Undertaking, an agreement among Chinese, Vietnamese and Philippine oil companies to explore for oil in the South China Sea, collapsed after it was revealed that part of the area was uncontested Philippine waters. Faced with accusations from opposition political parties of bargaining away Philippine territory ruling elites in Manila allowed the agreement to lapse in June 2008. The Japanese government's decision to nationalize three of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in 2012 is also an example of domestic actors narrowing the terms of acceptable outcomes for policy-makers, by making it virtually impossible to ignore territorial issues. …

Agent-based game-theoretic model for collaborative web services: Decision making analysis

In agent and (web) service computing, collaboration takes place when distributed entities have limited knowledge and capabilities, so they cannot perform required tasks without interacting and helping each other. For instance, web services, which are loosely-coupled business applications, are called to cooperate in distributed settings for the sake of efficiency. In this context, agents that abstract and act on behalf of web services could act in cooperative groups that gather a number of agents sharing some common goals. Enabling those agent-based web services to decide about their strategies in terms of joining and acting within groups, inviting other agents to join, and leaving a group to act alone is an open issue that we address in this work. In this paper, we propose a framework where agent-based web services select strategies that maximize their outcomes. These strategies could be categorized into cooperative strategies involving other agents and strategies that highlight the single operative attitude. Although cooperation seems to bring better utility to cooperative agents, we highlight that web services in some environments obtain better outcome while they act individually (i.e., outside the group). This means that the cost of cooperation (in some particular cases) might negatively influence the outcome and obtained utility. As solution, we propose in this paper (1) an agent-based model that formalizes web services decision making where different parameters are considered; and (2) a game-theoretic framework that analyzes the web services strategies allowing them to maximize their acting performance where non-zero-sum games are being used. The paper presents theoretical results, which are also confirmed through extensive simulations.

Adaptation to a new environment allows cooperators to purge cheaters stochastically

Cooperation via production of common goods is found in diverse life forms ranging from viruses to social animals. However, natural selection predicts a "tragedy of the commons": Cheaters, benefiting from without producing costly common goods, are more fit than cooperators and should destroy cooperation. In an attempt to discover novel mechanisms of cheater control, we eliminated known ones using a yeast cooperator-cheater system engineered to supply or exploit essential nutrients. Surprisingly, although less fit than cheaters, cooperators quickly dominated a fraction of cocultures. Cooperators isolated from these cocultures were superior to the cheater isolates they had been cocultured with, even though these cheaters were superior to ancestral cooperators. Resequencing and phenotypic analyses revealed that evolved cooperators and cheaters all harbored mutations adaptive to the nutrient-limited cooperative environment, allowing growth at a much lower concentration of nutrient than their ancestors. Even after the initial round of adaptation, evolved cooperators still stochastically dominated cheaters derived from them. We propose the "adaptive race" model: If during adaptation to an environment, the fitness gain of cooperators exceeds that of cheaters by at least the fitness cost of cooperation, the tragedy of the commons can be averted. Although cooperators and cheaters sample from the same pool of adaptive mutations, this symmetry is soon broken: The best cooperators purge cheaters and continue to grow, whereas the best cheaters cause rapid self-extinction. We speculate that adaptation to changing environments may contribute to the persistence of cooperative systems before the appearance of more sophisticated mechanisms of cheater control.

Incentive Scheduler Algorithm for Cooperation and Coverage Extension in Wireless Networks

In this paper, we focus on wireless coverage extension and nodes' cooperation. We propose a new protocol based on an incentive approach and a scheduling algorithm to reward cooperative nodes. The cost of cooperation can be prohibitively expensive in terms of quality of service (QoS) and energy consumption, which does not motivate some nodes to cooperate. Therefore, we introduce a percentage of cooperation and QoS parameters in the scheduling algorithm called coverage extension based on incentive scheduling to incite potential mobile relaying nodes to cooperate and, in turn, extend the wireless areas. We use the cross-layer approach to optimize the QoS parameters. The proposed solution not only incites the nodes to cooperate but enhances the QoS by increasing the average throughput and decreasing the delay as well. The simulation results show that the proposed solution not only gives better results than the well-known scheduling algorithms, such as maximum signal-to-noise ratio (MaxSNR) and weighted fair opportunistic (WFO), but allows the cooperative mobile nodes to increase their own throughput by around 114% as well. The total amount of data transmitted out of the cell to extend the coverage can be increased by around 59% compared with the scheduling algorithm MaxSNR.

Firm Value and Its Size: A Model of Cooperation and Agency Costs

An important variable absent in agency cost analyses is the extent of cooperation among the manager and the investors. Two types of cooperation are studied: 1.) generalized cooperation, a concept close to social capital; and 2.) discriminating cooperation, a concept close to cooperation with relatives. These types of cooperation affect managerial private benefits differently; while generalized cooperation reduces agency costs, discriminating cooperation may enlarge them, until the manager becomes highly close toward his cooperating investor.

Co-evolution between sociality and dispersal: The role of synergistic cooperative benefits

Explaining the evolution of sociality is challenging because social individuals face disadvantages that must be balanced by intrinsic benefits of living in a group. One potential route towards the evolution of sociality may emerge from the avoidance of dispersal, which can be risky in some environments. Although early studies found that local competition may cancel the benefits of cooperation in viscous populations, subsequent studies have identified conditions, such as the presence of kin recognition or specific demographic conditions, under which altruism will still spread. Most of these studies assume that the costs of cooperating outweigh the direct benefits (strong altruism). In nature, however, many organisms gain synergistic benefits from group living, which may counterbalance even costly altruistic behaviours. Here, we use an individual based model to investigate how dispersal and social behaviour co-evolve when social behaviours result in synergistic benefits that counterbalance the relative cost of altruism to a greater extent than assumed in previous models. When the cost of cooperation is high, selection for sociality responds strongly to the cost of dispersal. In particular, cooperation can begin to spread in a population when higher cooperation levels become correlated with lower dispersal tendencies within individuals. In contrast, less costly social behaviours are less sensitive to the cost of dispersal. In line with previous studies, we find that mechanisms of global population control also affect this relationship: when whole patches (groups) go extinct each generation, selection favours a relatively high dispersal propensity, and social behaviours evolve only when they are not very costly. If random individuals within groups experience mortality each generation to maintain a global carrying capacity, on the other hand, social behaviours spread and dispersal is reduced, even when the latter is not costly.

Bounded rationality and social interaction in negotiating a climate agreement

An agreement on climate change mitigation hinges on large-scale international cooperation. Rational agents are supposed to consider the cost and benefits of cooperation, which then determine their negotiation positions. Behavioral economics provides experimental evidence that decision-making in negotiation-like situations is influenced by systematic cognitive biases and social interaction. In this paper, we examine the impact of bounded rationality and social preferences on bargaining in international climate negotiations and illustrate how particular deviations from full rationality affect the incentives to cooperate. Of special interest are fairness preferences for burden-sharing rules and behavioral responses to different framings of climate change and policy, as well as implications of these for communication about climate change. The analysis will further address different levels of representation, including individual citizens, politicians, experts, and (professional) negotiators. The consequences of the most prominent nonstandard preferences and biases for negotiating a climate treaty are assessed, and specific strategies to foster cooperation are suggested.

Legitimacy, Global Governance and Human Rights Institutions: Inverting the Puzzle

In this chapter, I draw on recent scholarship on the alleged legitimacy deficits in global governance institutions, seeking to engage the notions of legitimacy this literature suggests with the intriguing case of international human rights institutions. First, I reconstruct how this literature views the problem of legitimacy in global governance, a view that relies on a particular notion of international institutions which both explains and justifies global governance institutions in terms of the collective goods they help states obtain. The puzzle of legitimacy, on this view, lies in offering citizens valid reasons to obey, support or abstain from interfering with global governance institutions – reasons that include certain procedural, epistemic and substantive elements, which together comprise a complex, hybrid standard of legitimacy. Second, I explore to what extent this view of legitimacy problems in global governance institutions can be applied for analyzing corresponding legitimacy problems in international human rights institutions. Drawing on recent liberal international scholarship, I discuss the ways in which international human rights institutions constitute a different kind of political entity than typical global governance institutions. Uniquely, international human rights institutions do not help states obtain any joint benefits, but regulate the internal relation between a government and individuals under its jurisdiction, and, to the extent that they are effective, chiefly rely on domestic mechanisms of enforcement. This crucial difference between the two kinds of international institutions, in turn, changes the legitimacy puzzle involved. In the human rights area, the problem of legitimacy rarely entails offering citizens reasons why they should accept to bear the costs of international cooperation in light of the benefits it provides for states. Rather, the issue is why governments should accept their obligations under international human rights law, in light of the benefits human rights treaties provide for citizens. In the third section, I draw out the implications of this analysis for finding such reasons. While the complex, hybrid standards of legitimacy suggested for global governance institutions seem difficult to transpose to international human rights institutions, the discarded notion of state consent provides an essential component of legitimacy for the human rights area. Finally, I discuss whether the notion of international institutions discussed in the chapter may have implications beyond the human rights area.

Analysis of policy implications and challenges of the Cuban health assistance program related to human resources for health in the Pacific

BackgroundCuba has extended its medical cooperation to Pacific Island Countries (PICs) by supplying doctors to boost service delivery and offering scholarships for Pacific Islanders to study medicine in Cuba. Given the small populations of PICs, the Cuban engagement could prove particularly significant for health systems development in the region. This paper reviews the magnitude and form of Cuban medical cooperation in the Pacific and analyses its implications for health policy, human resource capacity and overall development assistance for health in the region.MethodsWe reviewed both published and grey literature on health workforce in the Pacific including health workforce plans and human resource policy documents. Further information was gathered through discussions with key stakeholders involved in health workforce development in the region.ResultsCuba formalised its relationship with PICs in September 2008 following the first Cuba-Pacific Islands ministerial meeting. Some 33 Cuban health personnel work in Pacific Island Countries and 177 Pacific island students are studying medicine in Cuba in 2010 with the most extensive engagement in Kiribati, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu and Vanuatu. The cost of the Cuban medical cooperation to PICs comes in the form of countries providing benefits and paying allowances to in-country Cuban health workers and return airfares for their students in Cuba. This has been seen by some PICs as a cheaper alternative to training doctors in other countries.ConclusionsThe Cuban engagement with PICs, while smaller than engagement with other countries, presents several opportunities and challenges for health system strengthening in the region. In particular, it allows PICs to increase their health workforce numbers at relatively low cost and extends delivery of health services to remote areas. A key challenge is that with the potential increase in the number of medical doctors, once the local students return from Cuba, some PICs may face substantial rises in salary expenditure which could significantly strain already stretched government budgets. Finally, the Cuban engagement in the Pacific has implications for the wider geo-political and health sector support environment as the relatively few major bilateral donors, notably Australia (through AusAID) and New Zealand (through NZAID), and multilaterals such as the World Bank will need to accommodate an additional player with whom existing links are limited.

Coordination of cooperative cost-reduction efforts in a supply chain partnership

We study cooperative cost reduction in a decentralized supply chain with a single manufacturer and multiple suppliers. The manufacturer assembles components that are procured from the suppliers to produce a final product. Both the manufacturer and the suppliers invest in reducing the unit production costs of the components. We see that neither of the two well-known conventional contracts, the wholesale price contract and the cost-plus pricing contract, generally coordinates the supply chain, i.e., under both of these types of contract, the individual optimal cost-reduction efforts of players deviate from the centralized system-optimal solution. However, this result is not surprising because these contracts encourage either only the manufacturer or only the suppliers alone to invest in cost reduction.The main goal of this paper is to investigate the alignment of the incentives of the players in order to advance cooperative cost-reduction activities. We develop two types of agreements contingent on the cost-reduction efforts of the players that coordinate the supply chain and support the cooperative efforts of the players: effort sharing agreements and effort compensation agreements. The former shares the benefits of cooperative cost reduction, and the latter compensates the parties for the costs of their efforts.

European Integration as Compromise: Recognition, Concessions and the Limits of Cooperation

AbstractThe role of compromise in EU politics has been widely recognized by scholars and practitioners alike. At the same time, the systematic conceptual, analytical and normative study of compromise has remained an exception. This is surprising, given that the study of compromise can be linked to three broader questions at the heart of integration: (1) How does the EU accommodate diversity? (2) What makes supranational rule normatively justifiable? (3) Who or what defines the limits of cooperation? Against this backdrop, this article sheds light on the concept of compromise, on the role of compromise in legitimizing supranational governance and on the limits to compromise in the European polity. I argue that the EU – a divided, multilevel and functionally restricted polity – is highly dependent on the legitimizing force of ‘inclusive compromise’, which is characterized by the recognition of difference. This is true for horizontal or micro-level relations between political actors (where compromise works through concessions as well as justification, perspective-taking and empathic concern in a process of ‘procedural accommodation’), and for vertical or macro-level relations between systems of governance (where compromise works through ‘constitutional compatibility’). Given the legitimizing force of inclusive compromise, I subsequently identify the limits to such agreements and, thus, to supranational cooperation; I argue that these limits are issue specific and depend on where the costs of cooperation are borne. The article concludes by outlining routes for follow-up empirical research.

Cooperating with the State: Evidence from Survey Experiments on Policing in Moscow

What factors affect citizens’ willingness to cooperate with the state? We explore this question through a study of citizens’ willingness to report crimes to the police, one of the quintessential forms of cooperation with the state apparatus. We develop a 'calculus of cooperation' that highlights three sets of factors that potentially influence citizens’ incentives to report a crime: benefits of cooperation received only if the crime is solved, benefits of cooperation received regardless of whether the crime is solved, and costs of cooperation. We evaluate the importance of these considerations using data from a set of survey experiments conducted in Moscow, Russia in December 2011. We find that citizens’ willingness to cooperate with the police is influenced by the nature and perpetrator of the crime but not by material rewards, appeals to civic duty, or the time required to report a crime. These results suggest skepticism about the ability of governments to easily engineer cooperation with the state.