SOCIAL DILEMMAS: the evolution of cooperation

Cooperation has been implicated in all the major transitions of life, from the emergence of multi-cellularity to the global arrangement of human institutions. Yet explaining how cooperative behavior could evolve remains an unfinished task. Standard economic game theory predicts that selfish behavior should drive cooperating entities to extinction yet cooperation is pervasive in nature. In this theme of research I concentrate on how individual incentives, primarily in the form of policing or punishment, can lead to the evolution of a cooperative population, especially when the population’s interactions are structured in non-random ways (e.g. by a social network). This research seeks to answer not only basic theoretical questions of evolution but to have broad applicability in areas such as international relations, sustainability, conflict resolution and avoidance, and market design and regulation. In particular this research seeks to understand and promote the provisioning of global public goods and contribute to sustainability theory.