Case study on social altruism
Reading this article on cooperation, I decided to create a small experiment using Akka actors.
There is a central pot who's job is to welcome users and wait until there are enough participants to start a session.
Each participant decides how much to collaborate each turn to the central pot; at the end of the turn, the money is multiplied by two and returned to each participant in same amount.
I have created 3 types of participants:
- Saint: Always collaborates to the pot.
- Rascal: Never collaborates
- Vigilante: Cooperates only if he notes others are also cooperating.
Code is implemented in Java using actors. Quite interesting study, indeed.
Last part I'm working on will include a "punish mode", so vigilantes can spend an extra 10% of the contribution on top to the pot so the rascals don't get any reward in a particular turn.
Eventually, it'll also be interesting to add a feature to change types of participants depending on the perceived benefit of their previous behavior.
In principle, each "economic" actor acts on his own self interest: A pot made only of rascals will eventually die out, after all saints have lost all their money.
This tries to model real life social behaviors, where some studies show, there is a "prosocial punishment", where a high percentage of people would happily pay some of their money in order to punish people who don't; when punishment is working, rascals turn into normal contributors or even vigilantes.
So it seems some economic actors see a benefit on acting not only on self interest but on a greater level, in order to guarantee the correct functioning of the pot.
Yuval Novah Harari, when he interviewed by Lex, mentioned a significant advantage of humans, and which has made us the successful as a species, is the ability to cooperate flexibly and in very large numbers.
Yuval Noah Harari(00:21:54) You have advantages on both sides. What really made us successful, what made us the rulers of the planet and not the chimps and not the Neanderthals, is not any individual ability, but our collective ability. Our ability to cooperate flexibly in very large numbers. Chimpanzees know how to cooperate, say, 50 chimpanzees, a hundred chimpanzees. As far as we can tell from archeological evidence this was also the case with Neanderthals. Homo sapiens, about 70,000 years ago, gained an amazing ability to cooperate basically in unlimited numbers. You start seeing the formation of large networks; political, commercial, religious, items being traded over thousands of kilometers, ideas being spread, artistic fashions. This is our secret of success. Chimpanzees, Neanderthals can cooperate, say, a hundred.
rdev
