The Institutional Foundations of Cooperation and Trading

圣菲研究所（SFI）工作组合作与贸易的制度基础是欧洲科学基金会欧洲核心合作与贸易演变项目（TECT）的一个组成部分，该项目探索合作的社会和心理动力（SOCCOP）。SFI小组试图解释群体层面的制度在早期人类合作和贸易演变中的作用，并探索行为经济学和认知心理学的最新进展对改善公司、社区和国家合作和贸易关系治理的影响。本项目使用进化博弈论和基于主体的模拟以及经验资源来模拟与合作和交易相关的群体层面制度和个人偏好的共同进化。要研究的机构包括生殖平衡和其他群体内减少差异的策略，新的财产和社会经济等级制度的出现和随后的动态，以及内部外部的区别和频繁的群体间冲突。该项目还开发了一个经济和公民动机相互作用的新模型，以探索人类物种合作性质的最新实验证据对设计更有效的公共政策和制度的影响。最终目标是促进SOCCOP项目和其他TECT项目的高级学者、学生和其他从事相关研究的人员之间的联系。这项研究调查了一些假设，这些假设位于生物学和人类社会和行为科学中一些最具活力的领域的交叉点。据《科学》杂志的编辑称，人类合作的进化是当今科学界面临的前25个问题之一。社会科学和行为科学日益认识到内生性偏好、制度创新和持久性的重要性，以及两者之间的关系。然而，在一定程度上，由于将制度和个体进化结合起来的数学困难，以及将它们与相关案例的经验知识结合起来的需要，这些制度的动态在大多数进化模型中被忽视了。SFI研究团队已经在这种新颖的建模和相关的实证工作中建立了良好的记录。这项研究将在科学界之外产生更广泛的影响，因为对合作和公民动机的理解对于动员不同的个人实现共同目标的任务至关重要，无论是在公司、社区、国家还是全球社区。需要发展的一个关键思想是，如果公民和经济参与者完全是自利的，那么那些被设计为运作良好的制度，对于一个异质性的人口来说，通常不是最好的制度，因为在这个人口中，大量人口的动机是强烈的互惠动机、不平等厌恶、内部偏见或其他社会偏好，以及自利。在公共政策方面的应用包括从刑事判决的最佳威慑到促进遵守环境保护措施的政策。

The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) work group The Institutional Foundations of Cooperation and Trading is a component of the European Science Foundation Eurocores project on Evolution of Cooperation and Trading (TECT) exploring the Social and Mental Dynamics of Cooperation (SOCCOP). The SFI group seeks to explain the role of group-level institutions in the evolution of cooperation and trading among early humans and explore the implications of recent advances in behavioral economics and cognitive psychology for improving the governance of cooperative and trading relationships in firms, neighborhoods, and nations. This project uses evolutionary game theory and agent-based simulations as well as empirical sources to model the co-evolution of those group-level institutions and individual preferences associated with cooperation and trading. Among the institutions to be studied are reproductive leveling and other within-group variance-reduction strategies, the emergence and subsequent dynamics of novel systems of property and socio-economic hierarchy, as well as insider outsider distinctions and frequent intergroup conflict. This project also develops a novel model of the interplay of economic and civic motivations to explore the implications of recent experimental evidence of the cooperative nature of our species for the design of more effective public policies and institutions. A final objective is to facilitate networking of both senior scholars in the SOCCOP project and other TECT projects, students, and others engaged in related research. This study investigates hypotheses that are situated at the intersection of some of the most vibrant fields in biology and the human social and behavioral sciences. According to the editors of Science the evolution of cooperation among humans is one of the top 25 questions facing the scientific community today. The importance of endogenous preferences, institutional innovation and persistence, and the relationship among the two is increasingly recognized in the social and behavioral sciences. Yet in part due to the formidable mathematical difficulties of combining institutional and individual evolution and the need to combine these with empirical knowledge of the relevant cases, the dynamics of these institutions has been overlooked in most evolutionary models. The SFI research team has already established a strong track record in this novel kind of modeling and related empirical work. The study will have broader impacts beyond the scientific community because an understanding of cooperative and civic motives is essential to the task of mobilizing diverse individuals towards common ends, whether in firms, neighborhoods, nations, or global communities. A key idea to be developed is that institutions that are designed to work well if citizens and economic actors are entirely self-interested will not generally be the best institutions for a heterogeneous population in which significant numbers are motivated by strong reciprocity motives, inequality aversion, insider bias, or other social preferences, as well as by self-interest. Applications to public policy range from optimal deterrence in criminal sentencing to policies to promote compliance with environmental protection measures.