Levin - Games, Groups and the Global Good (Springer, 2009).pdf - Discrete Mathematics - Yohoho25

Springer Series in Game Theory

Simon A. Levin

Editor

Games, Groups,

and the Global Good

123

Editor

Professor Simon A. Levin

Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Princeton University

Eno Hall

Princeton, NJ 08544-1003

USA

slevin@eno.princeton.edu

ISSN 1868-517x

ISBN 978-3-540-85435-7

e-ISBN 978-3-540-85436-4

DOI 10.1007/978-3-540-85436-4

Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009926063

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Preface

No problem is more central to understanding biological organization than explain-

ing cooperation. Indeed, the puzzles posed by extreme forms of cooperation were

acknowledged by Darwin as challenges to his theories, and delayed his publication

of the Origin of Species for 20 years. Today, we have learned a great deal about

the evolution of cooperation, from quorum sensing in bacteria to coalitions among

humans. Nevertheless, deep questions remain. How is cooperation maintained in

large groups, where individuals help others they have never met, or whose identi-

ties are unknown to the helpers? Why will individuals apparently sacriﬁce their own

welfare to sustain community norms, through charitable behaviors or punishment of

norm offenders? How are institutions, from social norms to civil and religious laws,

maintained? How do moral systems arise, and how are they maintained? These ques-

tions are central to understanding how societies maintain robustness, and they also

are key to achieving a sustainable future for humanity.

Much of the formal theory of cooperation can be embedded within the theory of

games, the origins of which are usually traced to John von Neumann’s “Zur Theo-

rie der Gesellschaftsspiele,” ( On the Theory of Parlor Games ) published in 1928 in

Mathematische Annalen, 100, pp. 295–300. Actually, Emile Borel published sev-

eral papers that laid the foundations for game theory 7 years earlier, but it was

von Neumann who really began to develop a comprehensive theory, culminating

in his 1944 Princeton book with Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Eco-

nomic Behavior. Von Neumann died in 1958; and on the 50th anniversary of his

death, a symposium was organized at Princeton University with the sponsorship of

the John Templeton Foundation to revisit progress in the theory of cooperation, and

particularly to investigate what new advances in game theory might be stimulated

by considering the broader question of the establishment of moral systems and the

regulation of public goods. Most of the participants in that symposium then devel-

oped their papers into longer contributions for this book, and other authors were

invited to complete the story.

Societies cannot exist without cooperation, or without norms, customs, laws, and

other institutions that sustain cooperation. These provide collective beneﬁts that

maintain the groups, and provide them advantages in conﬂict with other groups.

One of the great challenges facing humanity is in discovering whether those col-

lective beneﬁts can be extended to the global level, without the tribal conﬂicts that

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