> Under competition, acting like this is the best way to raise to the top

Do you have evidence for that, or is it your guess?

The study I am aware of on the subject concluded the best strategy in a competitive environment is to act fairly and assume fair play on everyone's behalf, but if someone crosses you, respond with all out force.

I think it's called "Generous Tit-for-tat". I don't think "be shitty when you have something to gain" is recognized as a good strategy in Game Theory.

If you want academic support for "if everyone else cheats and gets away with it, you'll have to cheat too" you might enjoy The Market for Lemons [1]

This argues that, if 50% of used cars are good and worth $8000, and 50% are bad and worth $4000, and customers can't tell them apart on the lot, the buyers' expected value is $6000 so the sellers of good cars will make a loss and go out of business. That in turn will reduce the buyers' expected value to $4000.

Obviously, that issue is specific to markets without seller reputations, reliable independent reviews, useful warranties, or effective consumer protection laws. Is Amazon Marketplace that way? You be the judge!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

Generous Tit-for-Tat was the winning algorithm in a very particular scenario: repeated prisoner's dilemma. Each player knew the full history of its opponent's participation in the game and knew therefore that there would be consequences for its behavior in the current game. In this scenario your identity and reputation are perfectly known. This is a very different game.

Do you actually need more than the previous round or two of actions to utilize the be-kind-until-crossed strategy?

I’m not sure it requires perfect information, just accurate recent information.

For iterated prisoner's dilemma, you need the game to be infinitely long, meaning neither player knows when it will end. The moment either player realizes when the game is going to end, the game reverts to a regular prisoner's dilemma, and the first player to betray the other will win. The last round has no benefit for playing a Nice strategy, so you need to stab before the other player also realizes the game is going to end.

That doesn’t require infinite length, just indeterminate length and more than a single round (on average, or with certain rate).

And I’m not sure that it doesn’t apply to the case where:

A) You can’t determine when the game will end, and

B) There’s very often several rounds.

That seems to cover “society”, in a broad sense.

Yes, that's what I'm saying. Whether it applies to society or not depends on how often you have repeat interactions with the same person. For example, in a big city where you can expect to never run into someone again, I would expect people to favor Betray over Cooperate. Whereas, in a small village where you can't escape the people around you, I would expect people to favor Cooperate.

> but if someone crosses you, respond with all out force

How do you do that with Amazon? Stop buying from this one seller? Report them? But chances are you were not going to buy anything else from them anyway and I am not sure how much of a problem a report is. And you are not doing anything about the other bajillion bad sellers, so your next buying experience is like ly to turn out just the same.

Link to that study?

I think the first time I heard about it might have been on this Planet Money episode: https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...

But I'm not really sure. This Google search links to a bunch of papers on the subject. It's a well explored area of research:

https://www.google.com/search?q=repeated+prisoner%27s+dilemm...

True, and penalizing misbehavior is a big part of the solution here, but it's also true that there are practical social limits on behavior (including competitive behavior), and these can wax and wane culturally, giving rise to greater or lesser degrees of trust and good faith in commerce. ("What can I count on from people in general?")

Isn’t penalizing players who breach etiquette what separates games from fights?

I’ve literally never understood that idea, because it’s antithetical to what separates games from genuine conflict: adherence to social norms during contests.

Lying to make a sale is known as fraud, and “against the rules”, so to speak: enforcing that isn’t “hating the player”, it’s “protecting the game”.