Abstract
No society could exist without the willingness of its members to cooperate. There are so many different forms of cooperation that attempting to provide a general characterization of cooperation might seem a hopeless enterprise. Basic decision-theoretic techniques, however, allow for a definition of cooperation. A cooperative action can be defined as the choice of the dominated strategy in a situation of interaction which is of the same type as the prisoner’s dilemma. This definition is in accord with the most important, if not with all of the usages of the term “cooperation” and this surprisingly simple characterization, therefore, is no arbitrary “nominal definition”.
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Nida-Rümelin, J. (2019). Cooperation. In: Structural Rationality and Other Essays on Practical Reason. Theory and Decision Library A:, vol 52. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95507-0_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95507-0_4
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