Bernardo A.Huberman and Natalie S.Glance
Dynamics of Computation Group
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
Palo Alto, CA 94304
huberman@parc.xerox.com
Individuals in groups must often choose between acting selfishly and
cooperating for the common good. The choices they make are based on
their beliefs on how they expect their actions to affect others. We show
that for a broad set of beliefs and group characteristics cooperation
can appear spontaneously in non-cooperative groups after very long
periods of time. When delays in information are unavoidable the group
dynamics acquires a wide repertoire of behaviors, ranging from
opportunistic oscillations to bursty chaos, thus excluding the
possibility of sustained cooperation.
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