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Payoff-based learning explains the decline in cooperation in public goods games.

ABSTRACT: Economic games such as the public goods game are increasingly being used to measure social behaviours in humans and non-human primates. The results of such games have been used to argue that people are pro-social, and that humans are uniquely altruistic, willingly sacrificing their own welfare in order to benefit others. However, an alternative explanation for the empirical observations is that individuals are mistaken, but learn, during the game, how to improve their personal payoff. We test between these competing hypotheses, by comparing the explanatory power of different behavioural rules, in public goods games, where individuals are given different amounts of information. We find: (i) that individual behaviour is best explained by a learning rule that is trying to maximize personal income; (ii) that conditional cooperation disappears when the consequences of cooperation are made clearer; and (iii) that social preferences, if they exist, are more anti-social than pro-social.

SUBMITTER: Burton-Chellew MN

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4309006 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Payoff-based learning explains the decline in cooperation in public goods games.

Burton-Chellew Maxwell N MN Nax Heinrich H HH West Stuart A SA

Proceedings. Biological sciences 20150201 1801

Economic games such as the public goods game are increasingly being used to measure social behaviours in humans and non-human primates. The results of such games have been used to argue that people are pro-social, and that humans are uniquely altruistic, willingly sacrificing their own welfare in order to benefit others. However, an alternative explanation for the empirical observations is that individuals are mistaken, but learn, during the game, how to improve their personal payoff. We test be ...[more]

PMID: 25589609

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Project description:From the microscopic to the macroscopic level, biological life exhibits directed migration in response to environmental conditions. Chemotaxis enables microbes to sense and move towards nutrient-rich regions or to avoid toxic ones. Socio-economic factors drive human populations from rural to urban areas. The effect of collective movement is especially significant when triggered in response to the generation of public goods. Microbial communities can, for instance, alter their environment through the secretion of extracellular substances. Some substances provide antibiotic-resistance, others provide access to nutrients or promote motility. However, in all cases the maintenance of public goods requires costly cooperation and is consequently susceptible to exploitation. The threat of exploitation becomes even more acute with motile individuals because defectors can avoid the consequences of their cheating. Here, we propose a model to investigate the effects of targeted migration and analyze the interplay between social conflicts and migration in ecological public goods. In particular, individuals can locate attractive regions by moving towards higher cooperator densities or avoid unattractive regions by moving away from defectors. Both migration patterns not only shape an individual's immediate environment but also affects the entire population. For example, defectors hunting cooperators have a homogenizing effect on population densities. This limits the production of the public good and hence inhibits the growth of the population. In contrast, aggregating cooperators promote the spontaneous formation of patterns through heterogeneous density distributions. The positive feedback between cooperator aggregation and public goods production, however, poses analytical and numerical challenges due to its tendency to develop discontinuous distributions. Thus, different modes of directed migration bear the potential to enhance or inhibit the emergence of complex and sometimes dynamic spatial arrangements. Interestingly, whenever patterns emerge, cooperation is promoted, on average, population densities rise, and the risk of extinction is reduced.

Dataset Information

Payoff-based learning explains the decline in cooperation in public goods games.

Publications

Payoff-based learning explains the decline in cooperation in public goods games.

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