Analysis of the impact of income information on the emergence of cooperation

Abstract

Indirect reciprocity is a mechanism for the emergence of cooperation in society. This mechanism enables us to explain cooperation provided by a stranger, and is considered to be established by transmitting cooperative actions in the past to a third party as a good reputation. However, in real society, there may be other factors to motivate cooperation. In this study, we consider income as an index of wealth and analyze the impact of income information on the emergence of cooperation. For this purpose, we provide a model where agents play a repeated prisoner's dilemma based on income information. Then we evaluated the ratio of cooperative behavior chosen in the game through simulations with the model. As a result of the simulations, we cannot observe the emergence of cooperation in the setting when income information is given.