When Do We Learn to Cooperate? The Role of Social Learning in Social Dilemmas

In this paper, I look at the interaction between social learning and cooperative behavior. I model this using a social dilemma game with publicly observed sequential actions and asymmetric information about pay offs. I find that some informed agents in this model act, individually and without collusion, to conceal the privately optimal action. Because the privately optimal action is socially costly the behavior of informed agents can lead to a Pareto improvement in a social dilemma. In my model I show that it is possible to get cooperative behavior if information is restricted to a small but non-zero proportion of the population. Moreover, such cooperative behavior occurs in a finite setting where it is public knowledge which agent will act last. The proportion of cooperative agents within the population can be made arbitrarily close to 1 by increasing the finite number of agents playing the game. Finally, I show that under a broad set of conditions that it is a Pareto improvement on a corner value, in the ex-ante welfare sense, for an interior proportion of the population to be informed.

Who is the fairest of them all? The independent effect of attractive features and self-perceived attractiveness on cooperation among women

The present paper analyzes the extent to which attractiveness-related variables affect cooperative behavior in women. Cooperativeness is evaluated through a Prisoner's Dilemma Game (PDG). We consider several morphometric variables related to attractiveness: Fluctuating Asymmetry (FA), Waist-Hip Ratio (WHR, Body Mass Index (BMI) and Facial Femininity (FF). These variables have been shown to predict human behavior. We also include as a control variable a score for Self-Perceived Attractiveness (SPA). We test differences in these variables according to behavior in the PDG. Our results reveal that low FA women cooperate less frequently in the PDG. We also find that women with lower WHR are more cooperative. This result contradicts the expected relation between WHR and behavior in the PDG. We show that this effect of WHR on cooperation operates through its influence on the expectation that participants hold on the cooperative intent of their counterpart. In addition, we show that the effect of attractive features on cooperation occurs independently of the participants' perception of their own appeal. Finally, we discuss our results in the context of the evolution of cooperative behavior and under the hypothesis that attractiveness is a reliable indicator of phenotypic quality.