I have to start this blog post with a confession. I’ve never been interested in game theory, I’ve taken a few undergraduate courses on game theory, but I’ve always had a hard time understanding it all. However, I was a bit nervous about game theory (or at least parts of it), but I couldn’t express why I had reservations. That feeling was bigger.
Even these days, I still remember a conversation I had with a fellow undergraduate student (perhaps she was also a recent graduate) about game theory. She quite liked it and gave a good argument as to why it is helpful and good. One of the criticisms I raised at the time was that game theory had difficulty explaining cooperation. That’s what I thought.
What made me curious was how exactly game theory can explain cooperation if we assume that people are selfish and maximize expected utility (narrowly construed). She said, “Oh, that’s no big deal. Once we assume a repeated game, it makes sense to cooperate.” The answer in itself seemed convincing. After all, if you expect to see each other more than once, you should adjust your behavior accordingly. Then it might really be “reasonable” to cooperate and not betray. So I left it that day. But I couldn’t completely shake off my anxiety about the solution.
That changed after reading Joe Henrich’s monumental work. the strangest people in the worldPublished in 2020. Henrich did a lot with this pamphlet, but he also touched on prehistoric life. And in an interesting passage, he reflects on interactions between humans. Henrich (p.303) Write:
Weird people tend to think trading is simple. We have wild yams and you have fish. Let’s replace yams with fish. easy. But this is wrong. Imagine trying to barter yams for fish in the hunter-gatherer world described by William Berkeley in Australia. In this world, other groups were often hostile, and strangers were often killed on sight. To hide their activities at night, the band erected low grass fences around their bonfires so they would not be seen from afar. If I show up at your campfire with yams to trade, why not just kill me and take them? Or maybe you thought we were only offering you toxic yams that would slowly poison you and your band. It is difficult to know how smoothly trade could have taken place under such circumstances, which were probably common throughout the evolutionary history of our species.
If Henrich is right, we cannot simply assume there will be a second round, let alone an infinite round game. In fact, perhaps the most common kind of interaction is trying to kill each other. Or the two may refrain from interacting with each other at all.
But for various reasons was The second round assumes that the first interaction occurred and was peaceful. For example, we exchanged yams for fish. At least we didn’t kill each other with spears or poisonous yams. But this is cooperation, or at least very close to it, in the sense of peaceful, harmonious and reciprocal interaction, even in a very crude and basic form.
Following Henrich, the sheer fact that there is a second round of interaction, i.e. our game has started at all, and if it has started, does not end after the first instance (because either I killed you or you killed me ) , or at least the interaction was so unpleasant that neither of us sees any reason to ever interact again 😉 A basic level of cooperation is required.
However, this means that game theorists’ assumptions about repeated games to demonstrate that cooperation is possible and indeed follows a game-theoretic scenario are passive. They already assume that people’s interactions will be characterized by basic cooperation, or at least peacefulness, assuming that people will not kill each other at first sight in repetitive and even infinitely repeated games. Therefore, game theory implicitly assumes cooperative and peaceful interactions to explain cooperation. And that’s problematic.
I would like to return to the remarks I made at the beginning of this article. I am by no means an expert in game theory. I’m just an outsider offering my thoughts on game theory. I’m just a critic who misses the forest rather than the trees. But maybe a commenter on this blog can tell me where my reasoning went wrong. Or perhaps there is something to my critique and game theory has work to do.
Max Molden is a PhD student at the University of Hamburg. He worked with the European Students for Liberty and Prometheus (Das Freiheitsinstitut). He publishes regularly in Der Freydenker.
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