Cost Of Cooperation Research Articles

Evolutionary Game Mechanism of Governmental Cross-Regional Cooperation in AirPollution Management

Intergovernmental collaboration is essential for regionally coordinated air pollution prevention and control. An evolutionary game model of local government behavior strategy selection taking into account the fixed cost of the local government, the total amount of network production factors, and the total amount of total network factors of production that can be moved is built based on the social capital theory in order to realize the cross-border collaborative control of regional air pollution. The issue of an intergovernmental cooperation framework for collaborative prevention and control of large-scale air pollution is addressed from the standpoint of the multi-stakeholder “benefit–cost” drive. Additionally, the major variables influencing the behavioral approach selection for intergovernmental cooperation are considered. The initial sensitivity of the evolution path of the local government behavioral strategy is also analyzed. The results of this study are: (1) The primary elements impacting intergovernmental cooperation on joint prevention and control of air pollution are fixed costs and fixed benefits, and reducing the fixed costs of such cooperation in an appropriate manner without compromising local governments’ pollution control can do so. (2) Under the assumption that local governments have fixed expenses, the total amount of network factors of production and total network factors of production that can be moved factors of production have a direct impact on intergovernmental cooperation. When local governments’ fixed costs are constant, they are more likely to choose the cooperative behavior option if the sum of their network production factors and total network factors of production that can be moved is higher. (3) The initial probability of cooperation among the three parties and the total amount of production factors have an impact on the system’s ESS when local governments in the area have equal total production factors. The study’s findings can offer theoretical justification for the “profit-driven” intergovernmental coordination of joint prevention and management of air pollution.

An evolutionary game analysis of digital currency innovation and regulatory coordination.

The innovation and regulatory coordination of digital currency is an important proposition in the new era of Fintech. There is increasing competition between traditional currencies and new digital currencies, so a spontaneous game model of currencies is analyzed. By introducing the role of financial coordination, this paper revises the evolutionary game model of digital currency innovation, and analyzes their competition strategies through case and simulation. The results show that: first, the dominant result of digital currency spontaneous game is that both parties tend to digital cooperation strategy. Second, with the introduction of financial regulation, the dominant result of digital currency tripartite evolutionary game is that financial institutions tend to participate in coordination and both currency parties tend to cooperate. Third, the choice strategy of currency is more sensitive to the changes of willingness to participate in cooperation, cooperation costs and cooperation benefits of financial coordination. The selection strategy of financial coordination institutions for digital currency is more influenced by changes in cooperation costs and incentive return in the process of participating in cooperation.

The role of cluster organisations in stimulating cooperation between business and science. Experience from the Visegrad Group countries

Cooperation between science and business is regarded as a prerequisite for the development of innovation. The aim of this article is to provide a holistic view on the nature of business-research relations in cluster organisations in the Visegrad countries, by assessing their role in promoting this cooperation and identifying its determinants and barriers. The recognition of cluster organisations as a driver of innovation is connected with the fact that they create an environment conducive to cooperation, building trust between their members and reducing numerous barriers that limit it. This paper examines the role of cluster organisations in stimulating cooperation between business and science, providing a comparative analysis of the Visegrad countries in this respect. On the basis of in-depth interviews with managers of cluster organisations, and a survey of representatives of science-sector institutions, the authors clarified the role of cluster organisations in this process. Barriers were also diagnosed, such as the capacity constraints of R&D&I in SMEs, the cost of cooperation due to administrative overheads, differences in the organisational interest and culture. The study sheds new light on the role of cluster organisations and their members, showing that the ‘strategic innovators’ are critical to science-business cooperation. The research findings may inspire cluster organisation managers and other actors to create a common innovation ecosystem and approach, as well as encourage cluster organisation companies to implement joint research projects together with research organisations, which will result in mutual benefits for the parties involved.

국세청 홈택스시스템 개선을 통한 납세협력비용 절감에 관한 연구

[Purpose] The government has been trying to reduce the tax compliance costs by means of ‘Government 3.0’. Despite various efforts by the government to reduce the tax compliance costs, such as simplifying tax payment and introducing electronic tax invoices, the taxation system is not significantly reduced due to complicated taxation system, administrative service, filing system, and taxation system complexity.
 [Methodology] This study suggests creating the tax system for taxpayers, expand the service for report and payment by utilizing home tax service, as a reduction plan to decrease tax compliance costs.
 [Findings] First, it should improve the correctness of the HTS tax simulation. Second, if a person filing a comprehensive income tax invoice reports a comprehensive income tax, he or she will be prepared to complete the financial statements, and it is impossible to prepare the financial statements without preparing the accounts for the transactions. Therefore, it is necessary to provide the electronic account service. Third, the scope should expand the scope of the target information. Fourth, the succession tax payment information inquiry shall be provided. Fifth, the payment of national taxes and local taxes should be incorporated. Sixth, revise the National Tax Service Act to exempt the completion of payments from taxpayers in the process of paying taxes to the taxpayer.
 [Implications] This study proposed a plan to improve the National Tax Service's home tax system to contribute to enhancing national competitiveness by easing the administrative cost caused by taxes by suggesting a plan to reduce tax compiliance costs. The tax cooperation cost reduction plan proposed in this study has a high sense of taxpayer in that it uses the “home tax system”, and the government can realize it.

A Study on Inter-Regional Cooperation Patterns and Evolution Mechanism of Traditional and Renewable Energy Sources

To obtain the early realization of carbon peak and carbon neutrality in China, this study explores the cooperative relationship of inter-regional energy power-generation substitution between regions dominated by traditional thermal power and renewable energy sources (RES). By taking a regional government as the decision-making subject, focused on interest and environmental factors, an evolutionary game model of inter-regional energy cooperation is structured, and a simulation platform of the two different power-generation replacement cooperative patterns/strategies is constructed by using system dynamics. Then, the influences of the sensitive parameters on the cooperative evolutionary path under symmetric and asymmetric sharing cost cases have been discussed based on practical example in the regions of China. The results imply that agents can only select the favorable cooperative strategies unilaterally, by choosing a strategy of sharing the environmental revenues rather than the cooperative costs. When the failure cost of the opportunity revenues is less than or equal to the RES power-generation cost, a traditional thermal power regional government adopts a cooperative no-sharing strategy, while an RES regional government selects the opposite strategy. However, under the optimized dynamic proportional allocation schema, it is more likely that the traditional thermal power regional government will prefer cooperative sharing strategies, which can promote the social value of RES. This study provides beneficial inspiration for the Chinese government to further improve its RPS policy. The RES consumption fulfilled by direct or indirect trans-regional energy cooperation can be included in the RPS index framework assigned to traditional thermal power energy regions, and the added environmental value should be regarded as being as crucial as the economic and energy factors are in the cooperative process. In addition, RES regions that contribute more to clean energy absorption should raise the weight of the RPS rewards.

Citizen Cooperation with the Police: Evidence from Contemporary Guatemala

Community policing, and citizen cooperation with law enforcement more broadly, can improve local security outcomes by providing decentralized mechanisms for police accountability to local citizens. We hypothesize that five factors—alignment of citizen/police interests, relative costs of cooperation, costs of crime, prevalence of others’ cooperation, and perceived police efficacy—comprise a decision framework that guides citizens’ choices regarding whether to share information with law enforcement. We find evidence for this framework using rich survey and survey experimental data from a large nation-wide survey of Guatemalans and municipal administrative data. Our results indicate that increasing police efficacy, witness protection, and neighborhood trust boost the odds of cooperation with police by up to 55%. At a time when conversations about the relationship between community and police are widespread, this research offers insights into conditions under which cooperation between community members and law enforcement is most likely to occur.

Factors Influencing Intergovernmental Cooperation on Emission Reduction in Chengdu-Chongqing Urban Agglomeration: An Evolutionary Game Theory Perspective.

In this study, we introduced the realistic problem of a dynamic carbon tax, built several evolutionary game models for cooperative emission reduction by local governments, and determined the factors that influence governments' willingness to cooperate in emission reduction. The findings revealed that, first, the probability of governments opting for cooperative emission reduction strategies increases at different rates depending on the benefits and costs of cooperation. Second, externalities influence governments' willingness to cooperate in emission reduction during cooperative carbon emission reduction. Furthermore, the emergence of a free-riding situation reduces the effectiveness of intergovernmental cooperation in reducing carbon emissions. Third, carbon tax policy can influence the likelihood that local governments will choose cooperative emission reduction, and different carbon tax sizes have different effects on their willingness to choose cooperative emission reduction.

Dynamic Research on Three-Player Evolutionary Game in Waste Product Recycling Supply Chain System

Recycling channel construction plays an important role in the development of closed-loop supply chains. In particular, the emergence of online recycling channels has made up for the shortcomings of traditional recycling channels with poor information and limited markets. This paper constructs an evolutionary game model to investigate the cooperation between manufacturers and e-commerce platforms with government intervention or not. The result shows that whether an enterprise actively participates in the cooperative recycling depends on the actual cost of establishing the cooperative recycling system. Additionally, the government support and supervision will affect the actual cost of cooperation. When the actual cost of establishing a collaborative recovery system is very large, under the influence of government interventions, there will be two kinds of evolutionary results for enterprises, either with cooperation or not at the same time. On the contrary, when the actual cost is small or medium, both manufacturers and the platforms will choose to cooperate. Thus, government participation in a cooperative recovery system is the best strategic option.

Interaction between games give rise to the evolution of moral norms of cooperation.

In many biological populations, such as human groups, individuals face a complex strategic setting, where they need to make strategic decisions over a diverse set of issues and their behavior in one strategic context can affect their decisions in another. This raises the question of how the interaction between different strategic contexts affects individuals' strategic choices and social norms? To address this question, I introduce a framework where individuals play two games with different structures and decide upon their strategy in a second game based on their knowledge of their opponent's strategy in the first game. I consider both multistage games, where the same opponents play the two games consecutively, and reputation-based model, where individuals play their two games with different opponents but receive information about their opponent's strategy. By considering a case where the first game is a social dilemma, I show that when the second game is a coordination or anti-coordination game, the Nash equilibrium of the coupled game can be decomposed into two classes, a defective equilibrium which is composed of two simple equilibrium of the two games, and a cooperative equilibrium, in which coupling between the two games emerge and sustain cooperation in the social dilemma. For the existence of the cooperative equilibrium, the cost of cooperation should be smaller than a value determined by the structure of the second game. Investigation of the evolutionary dynamics shows that a cooperative fixed point exists when the second game belongs to coordination or anti-coordination class in a mixed population. However, the basin of attraction of the cooperative fixed point is much smaller for the coordination class, and this fixed point disappears in a structured population. When the second game belongs to the anti-coordination class, the system possesses a spontaneous symmetry-breaking phase transition above which the symmetry between cooperation and defection breaks. A set of cooperation supporting moral norms emerges according to which cooperation stands out as a valuable trait. Notably, the moral system also brings a more efficient allocation of resources in the second game. This observation suggests a moral system has two different roles: Promotion of cooperation, which is against individuals' self-interest but beneficial for the population, and promotion of organization and order, which is at both the population's and the individual's self-interest. Interestingly, the latter acts like a Trojan horse: Once established out of individuals' self-interest, it brings the former with itself. Importantly, the fact that the evolution of moral norms depends only on the cost of cooperation and is independent of the benefit of cooperation implies that moral norms can be harmful and incur a pure collective cost, yet they are just as effective in promoting order and organization. Finally, the model predicts that recognition noise can have a surprisingly positive effect on the evolution of moral norms and facilitates cooperation in the Snow Drift game in structured populations.

Will all autonomous cars cooperate? Brands’ strategic interactions under dynamic congestion

Autonomous cars allow safe driving with a smaller headway than that required for normal human-driven cars, thereby potentially improving road capacity. To attain this capacity benefit, cooperation among autonomous cars is vital. However, the future market may have multiple car brands and the incentive for them to cooperate is unknown. This paper investigates the competition and cooperation between multiple car brands that, may provide both autonomous and normal vehicles. We develop a two-stage game-theoretic model to investigate brands’ strategic interactions and evaluate, from both policy and organizational perspectives, the implications of their cooperation incentives and pricing competition. We compare four market structures: duopoly competition, perfect competition, a public welfare-maximizing monopoly, and a private profit-maximizing monopoly. Various parameters are evaluated, including factors such as the capacity benefits from cooperation, cooperation cost and price elasticity. This evaluation provides policy insights into actions that could be considered by regulators and organizations for the operation of autonomous cars.

Game evolution and simulation analysis of power battery recycling in China under conflicting supply and demand of critical metals

A great demand for lithium, cobalt, nickel, and other critical metals by power batteries has been increasing with the explosive development of the new energy industry, which further exacerbated the contradiction between the supply and demand of critical metals. In addition, two key factors, including an imbalance of government reward and punishment and a low degree of cooperation between manufacturers and recycling enterprises, have hindered the recovery and utilization of critical metals in power battery with the expansion of the power battery recycling market. A three-party evolutionary game model, including power battery manufacturers, third-party recycling enterprises, and the government, was constructed in this study to analyze the evolutionary stability of the strategy selection of each participant. Also, the influence of each factor on the three-party strategy selection and verifying the reliability of the results through simulation were also discussed. The results show that 1) both government incentives and punishments are beneficial for promoting cooperation between power battery manufacturers and recycling enterprises. The cost of cooperation will be the key factor affecting power battery recycling. 2) Increasing the probability of cooperation is an effective way to ensure the increase in income of both parties after cooperation. Further suggestions, including the establishment of a dynamic reward and punishment mechanism by the government and strengthening the cooperation to cope with the continued tight supply of critical metals by the manufacturers and recyclers, were also put forward in this research.

Evolutionary game study on information nodes setting in supply chain tracing based on compensation mechanism

Consumption compensation is the driving force for motivating each supply chain link to set up information nodes, which is of great significance for promoting informatization, modernization, transformation, and upgrading of the supply chain system. This study simulates the evolution process of strategic selection for each supply chain link to set information nodes independently or collectively under the unconstrained government rewards conditions and punishments. The main conclusions are as follows: (1) When each link in the supply chain provides source tracing information independently, the vendor chooses to set up information nodes for the links with large information cost compensation coefficients. (2) When the vendor provides source tracing information cooperatively if the collaborative benefit is less than the cooperation cost, the information node will be set to the link with the large compensation coefficient. If not, information nodes will be set in each link. (3) Under the government incentive mechanism, enterprises are willing to cooperate. The punishment mechanism helps avoid situations where neither side sets up information nodes. The compensation coefficient is a prerequisite for mechanisms to work.

Two-Stage Dynamic Alliance Bidding for Incremental Distribution and Retail Companies Based on Complex Network Theory

With the increase in renewable energy penetration, energy deviation settlement penalties are imposed on incremental distribution and retail companies (IDRCs). Most IDRCs are at financial risk. Given this background, a bidding model of the two-stage dynamic alliance is proposed to maximize IDRCs’ profits. In the first stage, potential alliances of IDRCs are established by the gravity model. In the second stage, the bi-level bidding model is modeled in energy and primary frequency regulation markets, where the upper level maximizes alliance profits by considering the cooperation costs and alliance constraints, and the lower level simulates market clearing. Then, the bi-level model is transformed into a mixed-integer linear programming model by the strong duality theory, Karush–Kuhn–Tucker conditions, and large M method. Verified by the complex network theory, results show that a complex alliance network has a high transmission efficiency and capacity to resist risk. Moreover, IDRCs with large capacity and superior location are important in the alliance. In addition, the proposed model increases the satisfaction rate by 20%, which increases IDRCs’ profits and reduces cooperation costs.

Costly signals can facilitate cooperation and punishment in the prisoner’s dilemma

Costly signal is regarded as one of the mechanisms to explain the emergence of cooperation. Both the cost of cooperation and the cost of punishment can be seen as expensive cost signals. Previous research has used costly signaling theory to explain the establishment of cooperation and punishment in public goods game. However, punishment is less likely to emerge stably in the prisoner’s dilemma, and the punisher cannot have additional information to identify and punish the defector. Therefore, it is particularly important to further study whether the expensive cost signal in the prisoner’s dilemma can promote the emergence of cooperation and punishment. We distinguish between costly punishing signals and costly cooperative signals in this paper to look at the rule that turns payoff into fitness. The findings reveal that, without punishment, if the costly signal is weak and the cost of cooperation is not too high compared to the benefit of cooperation, cooperation is a better choice than defection. With punishment, if there is a small amount of noise in the costly signaling mechanism and punishment is considered a more expensive signal than cooperation, punishment is a better strategy.

Decision making behaviours and management mechanisms for construction and demolition waste recycling based on public-private partnership.

Generation of construction and demolition waste (CDW) is a challenge for sustainable development. Recycling is required in response to energy consumption and natural resource depletion caused by CDW. Public-private partnership (PPP) mode provides a strategy for CDW recycling. This study aims to investigate the decision-making behaviours of the government and recyclers and propose management mechanisms to improve CDW recycling. Based on evolutionary game model, the influencing factors of stakeholders' behavioural strategies were identified, including the government supervision costs, penalty, subsidy, the benefits and costs of recyclers' cooperation and opportunism and consumers' purchase intention. The results revealed how the initial strategy proportions, penalties, subsidies and consumers' purchase intentions affect the evolutionary paths of stakeholders' decision-making behaviours in CDW recycling PPP projects. The larger the initial strategy value, the faster the evolutionary trajectory reaches ESS (0, 1). The penalty can restrain speculative behaviours of recyclers, whilst the subsidy has no significant effect. Consumer purchase intention can reduce the cost of government supervision and improve the cooperation efficiency of recyclers. These findings may contribute to enriching the body of knowledge in CDW and providing management mechanisms for CDW recycling practice. Appropriate penalty, subsidy and financial support policies should be formulated to promote the development of CDW recycling PPP projects.

Introspection dynamics: a simple model of counterfactual learning in asymmetric games

Social behavior in human and animal populations can be studied as an evolutionary process. Individuals often make decisions between different strategies, and those strategies that yield a fitness advantage tend to spread. Traditionally, much work in evolutionary game theory considers symmetric games: individuals are assumed to have access to the same set of strategies, and they experience the same payoff consequences. As a result, they can learn more profitable strategies by imitation. However, interactions are oftentimes asymmetric. In that case, imitation may be infeasible (because individuals differ in the strategies they are able to use), or it may be undesirable (because individuals differ in their incentives to use a strategy). Here, we consider an alternative learning process which applies to arbitrary asymmetric games, introspection dynamics. According to this dynamics, individuals regularly compare their present strategy to a randomly chosen alternative strategy. If the alternative strategy yields a payoff advantage, it is more likely adopted. In this work, we formalize introspection dynamics for pairwise games. We derive simple and explicit formulas for the abundance of each strategy over time and apply these results to several well-known social dilemmas. In particular, for the volunteer’s timing dilemma, we show that the player with the lowest cooperation cost learns to cooperate without delay.

Political Alliance Formation and Cooperation Networks in the Utah State Legislature.

Social network analysis has become an increasingly important tool among political scientists for understanding legislative cooperation in modern, democratic nation-states. Recent research has demonstrated the influence that group affinity (homophily) and mutual exchanges (reciprocity) have in structuring political relationships. However, this literature has typically focused on political cooperation where costs are low, relationships are not exclusive, and/or partisan competition is high. Patterns of legislative behavior in alternative contexts are less clear and remain largely unexamined. Here, we compare theoretical expectations of cooperation in these contexts from the political and biosocial sciences and implement the first assessment of political alliance formation in a novel legislative environment where costs to cooperation are high and party salience low. We implement a stochastic actor-oriented model (SAOM) to examine bill floor sponsorship, a process in which a "floor sponsor" becomes the exclusive advocate for a colleague's piece of legislation, in the Utah state legislature from 2005 to 2008-a context in which gender (male) and political party (Republican) supermajorities exist. We find that (1) party and gender homophily predict who legislators recruit as floor sponsors, whereas seniority does not, and (2) legislators frequently engage in reciprocal exchanges of floor sponsorship. In addition, whereas gender homophily increases the likelihood of reciprocity, party homophily decreases it. Our findings suggest that when the cost of cooperation is high, political actors use in-group characteristics for initiating alliances, but once a cooperative relationship is established with an out-group political member, it is reinforced through repeated exchanges. These findings may be useful for understanding the rise of political polarization and gridlock in democracies internationally.

Evolution of cooperation with respect to fixation probabilities in multi-player games with random payoffs

We study the effect of variability in payoffs on the evolution of cooperation (C) against defection (D) in multi-player games in a finite well-mixed population. We show that an increase in the covariance between any two payoffs to D, or a decrease in the covariance between any two payoffs to C, increases the probability of ultimate fixation of C when represented once, and decreases the corresponding fixation probability for D. This is also the case with an increase in the covariance between any payoff to C and any payoff to D if and only if the sum of the numbers of C-players in the group associated with these payoffs is large enough compared to the group size. In classical social dilemmas with random cost and benefit for cooperation, the evolution of C is more likely to occur if the variances of the cost and benefit, as well as the group size, are small, while the covariance between cost and benefit is large.

Arboricity games: the core and the nucleolus

The arboricity of a graph is the minimum number of forests required to cover all its edges. In this paper, we examine arboricity from a game-theoretic perspective and investigate cost-sharing in the minimum forest cover problem. We introduce the arboricity game as a cooperative cost game defined on a graph. The players are edges, and the cost of each coalition is the arboricity of the subgraph induced by the coalition. We study properties of the core and propose an efficient algorithm for computing the nucleolus when the core is not empty. In order to compute the nucleolus in the core, we introduce the prime partition which is built on the densest subgraph lattice. The prime partition decomposes the edge set of a graph into a partially ordered set defined from minimal densest minors and their invariant precedence relation. Moreover, edges from the same partition always have the same value in a core allocation. Consequently, when the core is not empty, the prime partition significantly reduces the number of variables and constraints required in the linear programs of Maschler’s scheme and allows us to compute the nucleolus in polynomial time. Besides, the prime partition provides a graph decomposition analogous to the celebrated core decomposition and the density-friendly decomposition, which may be of independent interest.

Markov Decision Process for Modeling Social Engineering Attacks and Finding Optimal Attack Strategies

It is important to comprehend the attacker’s behavior and capacity in order to build a stronger fortress and thus be able to protect valuable assets more effectively. Prior to launching technical and physical attacks, an attacker may enter the reconnaissance stage and gather sensitive information. To collect such valuable data, one of the most effective approaches is through conducting social engineering attacks, borrowing techniques from deception theory. As a result, it is of utmost importance to understand when an attacker behaves truthfully and when the attacker opts to be deceitful. This paper models attacker’s states using Markov Decision Process (MDP) and studies the attacker’s decision for launching deception attacks in terms of cooperation and deception costs. The study is performed through Markov Decision Process (MDP) modeling, where the states of attackers are modeled along with the permissible actions that can be taken. We found that the optimal policy regarding being deceitful or truthful depends on the cost associated with deception and how much the attacker can afford to take the risk of launching deception attacks. More specifically, we observed that when the cost of cooperation is low (e.g., 10%), by taking MDP optimal policy, the attacker cooperates with the victim as much as possible in order to gain their trust; whereas, when the cost of cooperation is high (e.g., 50%), the attacker takes deceptive action earlier in order to minimize the cost of interactions while maximizing the impact of the attack. We report four case studies and simulations through which we demonstrate the trade-off between cooperative and deceptive actions in accordance with their costs to attackers.