Document Type
Article
Publication Date
8-10-2017
Abstract
To better understand the evolutionary history of human decision-making, we compare human behavior to that of two monkey species in a symmetric game of conflict with two asymmetric equilibria. While all of these species routinely make decisions in the context of social cooperation and competition, they have different socio-ecologies, which leads to different predictions about how they will respond. Our prediction was that anti-matching would be more difficult than matching in a symmetric coordination with simultaneous moves. To our surprise, not only do rhesus macaques frequently play one asymmetric Nash equilibrium, but so do capuchin monkeys, whose play in the coordination game was literally not distinguishable from randomness (in simultaneous play). Humans are the only species to play both asymmetric equilibria in a repeated game.
Recommended Citation
Brosnan, S. F., Price, S. A., Leverett, K., Prétôt, L., Beran, M., & Wilson, B. J. (2017.). Human and monkey responses in a symmetric game of conflict with asymmetric equilibria. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2017.07.037
Peer Reviewed
1
Copyright
Elsevier
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Comments
NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version will be subsequently published in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization in 2017. DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2017.07.037
The Creative Commons license below applies only to this version of the article.