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Re:Resilient cooperators stabilize long-run cooperation in P... by shawnee_ on Saturday January 28, 2017 @12:54PM (#13507700)
I wonder if a better one sentence conclusion might be something like "Predictably nice players consistently distribute their gains to the group". After all, the interesting variable here is repeatability; that is, as certain players learn which players are consistently "nice" through repeated trials, they get iteratively better at gaming them to forfeit their (potential) gains.

In other words, over time, the "compound interest" on the gains the nice individuals lose gets rewarded to the group. Any individual in the group who can game "niceness" benefits the group at the expense of the nice individual. "Good guys finish last," or something of that nature?

Stabilized long-running cooperation seems like a very bad desired(?) outcome, by the way; is that what you're saying is a good thing? Pareto improvements are usually realized / discovered / gained by individuals who eschew tradition and playing nice.

Re:Resilient cooperators stabilize long-run cooperation in P... by mizzao on Saturday January 28, 2017 @05:26PM (#13509853)
It is true in our experiment that there are players who are consistently nice, and they experience lower daily payoffs than the other players. So, in one sense, "good guys finish last".

However, it's not true if you look at it from a long-term perspective. If the nice players know that not being nice would cause everyone to converge to the highly inefficient Nash equilibrium, then they are actually better off by being nice (and promoting cooperation) than they would be in the latter case. So even though they're not doing as well as the "selfish" players, they're better off than they would be in the dystopian alternate reality. (Ahem, ahem.)