[E] Evolution, Adaptation and Preferences: Cooperators and Defectors
Le 24 avr. 2025
Abstract
The article applies adaptive dynamics from evolutionary biology to study how social preferences evolve in group settings, particularly in public goods production. It examines how individuals' efforts interactions —whether they are substitutes or complements—and how these dynamics shape cooperation. A monomorphic population where all individuals have the same social preferences and therefore the same behaviors is an evolutionarily stable equilibrium only if the degree of complementarity between individual efforts in joint production is sufficiently high. If, on the contrary, individual efforts are too substitutable, then the population converges toward a polymorphic population with full cooperators co-existing with full defector.
