Reputation Effects in Public and Private Interactions.

We study the evolution of cooperation in a model of indirect reciprocity where people interact in public and private situations. Public interactions have a high chance to be observed by others and always affect reputation. Private interactions have a lower chance to be observed and only occasionally...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hisashi Ohtsuki, Yoh Iwasa, Martin A Nowak
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2015-11-01
Series:PLoS Computational Biology
Online Access:http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC4659694?pdf=render
Description
Summary:We study the evolution of cooperation in a model of indirect reciprocity where people interact in public and private situations. Public interactions have a high chance to be observed by others and always affect reputation. Private interactions have a lower chance to be observed and only occasionally affect reputation. We explore all second order social norms and study conditions for evolutionary stability of action rules. We observe the competition between "honest" and "hypocritical" strategies. The former cooperate both in public and in private. The later cooperate in public, where many others are watching, but try to get away with defection in private situations. The hypocritical idea is that in private situations it does not pay-off to cooperate, because there is a good chance that nobody will notice it. We find simple and intuitive conditions for the evolution of honest strategies.
ISSN:1553-734X
1553-7358