To cooperate or to defect? Altruism and reputation

Abstract

The basic problem in the cooperation theory is to justify the cooperation. Here we propose a new approach, where players are driven by their altruism to cooperate or not. The probability of cooperation depends also on the co-player's reputation. We find that players with positive altruism cooperate and met cooperation. In this approach, payoffs are not relevant. The mechanism is most efficient in the fully connected network.