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>Serious question: is there a game-theoretic name for this? From the view of evolutionary game theory he might be called a "neutrally fit cooperator" or "nearl
by gajomi 15y ago
>Serious question: is there a game-theoretic name for this?
From the view of evolutionary game theory he might be called a "neutrally fit cooperator" or "nearly-neutrally fit cooperator".
In public goods games cooperators increase the amount of public goods available to everyone, but if there is some cost to producing the good they can be subject to invasion by defectors. Amit's campaign definitely benefits everyone in the community more or less equally, but the cost to him (determined by the additional opportunities he might have had to find a donor for himself through some other means) are presumably quite low to the point where we can consider them to be zero. Since both cooperators and defectors pay nothing but receive the same benefit, they are equally fit and no relative fraction of strategies employed by the population is preferred (although having more cooperators should contribute to a higher overall payoff).
The interesting little twist to the story, if we are thinking in terms of evolutionary game theory, is that players that reach a certain payoff (e.g., by getting there transplant), leave the game with some probability! This is the opposite of what usually happens in games in evolutionary biology, since higher absolute payoff is typically associated with larger population sizes.