IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/b/pup/pbooks/9241.html
   My bibliography  Save this book

The Calculus of Selfishness

Author

Listed:
  • Karl Sigmund

    (University of Vienna, Austria)

Abstract

How does cooperation emerge among selfish individuals? When do people share resources, punish those they consider unfair, and engage in joint enterprises? These questions fascinate philosophers, biologists, and economists alike, for the "invisible hand" that should turn selfish efforts into public benefit is not always at work. The Calculus of Selfishness looks at social dilemmas where cooperative motivations are subverted and self-interest becomes self-defeating. Karl Sigmund, a pioneer in evolutionary game theory, uses simple and well-known game theory models to examine the foundations of collective action and the effects of reciprocity and reputation. Focusing on some of the best-known social and economic experiments, including games such as the Prisoner's Dilemma, Trust, Ultimatum, Snowdrift, and Public Good, Sigmund explores the conditions leading to cooperative strategies. His approach is based on evolutionary game dynamics, applied to deterministic and probabilistic models of economic interactions. Exploring basic strategic interactions among individuals guided by self-interest and caught in social traps, The Calculus of Selfishness analyzes to what extent one key facet of human nature--selfishness--can lead to cooperation.

Suggested Citation

  • Karl Sigmund, 2016. "The Calculus of Selfishness," Economics Books, Princeton University Press, edition 1, number 9241.
    • Handle: RePEc:pup:pbooks:9241
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ren, Tianyu & Zheng, Junjun, 2021. "Evolutionary dynamics in the spatial public goods game with tolerance-based expulsion and cooperation," Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Elsevier, vol. 151(C).
    2. Xiaoyu Li & Le Cheng & Xiaotong Niu & Siying Li & Chen Liu & Peican Zhu, 2021. "Highly cooperative individuals’ clustering property in myopic strategy groups," The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, Springer;EDP Sciences, vol. 94(6), pages 1-7, June.
    3. Peican Zhu & Xin Hou & Yangming Guo & Jiwei Xu & Jinzhuo Liu, 2021. "Investigating the effects of updating rules on cooperation by incorporating interactive diversity," The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, Springer;EDP Sciences, vol. 94(2), pages 1-8, February.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pup:pbooks:9241. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Webmaster (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://press.princeton.edu .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.