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RE: Is Cooperation Promoted by Punishment?
I remember I read an amazing article in the early '80s in Scientific American. It reported an experiment that later became famous in the Game Theory. It was the Robert Axelrod's tournament for trade algoritms. You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation#Axelrod.27s_tournaments
Shortly, the best strategy for trading was;
- be always trusty at first;
- always be fair;
- stop trading with unfair traders.
The name of that strategy was TIT-FOR-TAT. The experiment showed what Robert Trivers theorized: reciprocal altruism is a win-win strategy that creates social development even in untrusted groups.
Of course, this theory doesn't talk about power relations.
I would have to agree. Thanks for the summary, I will check it out more! 21st century economics in the West wants to support unfair things, like failing companies and bail them out for being too-big-to-fail hehe.
I remember Tit-for-Tat from college psychology... the beauty of it was that-- across multiple applications-- the outcome was reliably positive, on the balance.
and the funny thing was that Tit-For-Tat won every time the tournamente even if it was the simplest of all those algorithms. :)
btw, I was young and found that impressive.