social reciprocity theory: Wiki style.
In social psychology, reciprocity refers to responding to a positive action with another positive action, and responding to a negative action with another negative one. Positive reciprocal actions differ from altruistic actions as those only follow from other positive actions and they differ from social gift giving in that those are not actions taken with the hope or expectation of future positive responses.
Reciprocal actions are important to social psychology as they can help explain the maintenance of social norms. If a sufficient proportion of the population interprets the breaking of a social norm by another as a hostile action and if these people are willing to take (potentially costly) action to punish the rule-breaker then this can maintain the norm in the absence of formal sanctions. The punishing action may range from negative words to complete social ostracism.
In public good experiments, behavioral economists have demonstrated that the potential for reciprocal actions by players increases the rate of contribution to the public good, providing evidence for the importance of reciprocity in social situations.[1]
In mathematics, game theory describes reciprocity as a highly effective Tit for Tat strategy for the iterated prisoner's dilemma.
In the animal world reciprocity exists in the social behaviour of Baboons. Male Baboons will form alliances with one another in order that one baboon will distract the Alpha-male, who has monopolized reproductive females, and the other will copulate with a female. The roles will be reversed later for "payback."
It may be a motivation for returning favors from others.
Tit for tat: Wiki style.
Tit for tat From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Redirected from Tit for Tat) Jump to: navigation, search Question book-new.svg This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2007) This article is about the strategy in game theory. For the Laurel and Hardy film, see Tit for Tat (1935 film). For the song by Eddy Grant, see Reparation (album). A handshake when meeting someone is an example of initial cooperation
Tit for tat is a English saying meaning "equivalent retaliation". It is also a highly effective strategy in game theory for the iterated prisoner's dilemma. It was first introduced by Anatol Rapoport in Robert Axelrod's two tournaments, held around 1980. An agent using this strategy will initially cooperate, then respond in kind to an opponent's previous action. If the opponent previously was cooperative, the agent is cooperative. If not, the agent is not. This is similar to reciprocal altruism in biology. Contents [hide]
* 1 Overview * 2 Example of play * 3 Implications * 4 Problems * 5 Tit for two tats * 6 Real world use o 6.1 Peer-to-peer file sharing o 6.2 Explaining Reciprocal Altruism in Animal Communities o 6.3 War * 7 Popular culture * 8 See also * 9 References * 10 External links
[edit] Overview
This strategy is dependent on four conditions that has allowed it to become the most prevalent strategy for the prisoner's dilemma:
1. Unless provoked, the agent will always cooperate 2. If provoked, the agent will retaliate 3. The agent is quick to forgive 4. The agent must have a good chance of competing against the opponent more than once.
In the last condition, the definition of "good chance" depends on the payoff matrix of the prisoner's dilemma. The important thing is that the competition continues long enough for repeated punishment and forgiveness to generate a long-term payoff higher than the possible loss from cooperating initially.
A fifth condition applies to make the competition meaningful: if an agent knows that the next play will be the last, it should naturally defect for a higher score. Similarly if it knows that the next two plays will be the last, it should defect twice, and so on. Therefore the number of competitions must not be known in advance to the agents.
Against a variety of alternative strategies, tit for tat was the most effective, winning in several annual automated tournaments against (generally far more complex) strategies created by teams of computer scientists, economists, and psychologists. Game theorists informally believed the strategy to be optimal (although no proof was presented).
It is important to know that tit for tat still is the most effective strategy if the average performance of each competing team is compared. The team which recently won over a pure tit for tat team only outperformed it with some of their algorithms because they submitted multiple algorithms which would recognize each other and assume a master and slave relationship (one algorithm would "sacrifice" itself and obtain a very poor result for the other algorithm to be able to outperform Tit for Tat on an individual basis, but not as a pair or group). Still, this "group" victory illustrates an important limitation of the Prisoner's Dilemma in representing social reality, namely, that it does not include any natural equivalent for friendship or alliances. The advantage of "tit for tat" thus pertains only to a Hobbesian world of rational solutions, not to a world in which humans are inherently social.[citation needed] However, the fact that this solution does not work effectively against groups of agents running tit-for-tat does illustrate the strengths of tit-for-tat when employed in a team (that the team does better overall, and all the agents on the team do well individually, when every agent cooperates).
Free markets, and laws allowing me to retaliate when preyed upon. Hands rhe fuck off gooberit.
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