A New Methodology Is Needed To Understand Cooperative Behavior

Pu Yongjian / Wen

In a multi person society, how to divide labor effectively and maximize the total output is called production function in economics. However, even if there is a production function, even if there is a certain division of labor to maximize the total output, it does not guarantee that everyone is willing to automatically put himself in the division of labor pattern which can produce the maximum total output.

If everyone is able to choose a certain state of general stability, then everyone's general interests are not maximized. This state is the Nash equilibrium state of the game.

The economist Robbins once defined economics as the science of optimal allocation of resources. The so-called optimal allocation of resources means the highest economic efficiency. If the stable state is the normal state of economic society or the trend of economic activity movement, then this normal or ultimate state is actually inefficient. This result is not a state of optimal allocation of resources.

Therefore, game theory economists try to find a high-efficiency stable state of the game, that is, Pareto optimal stability. We can call the game behavior which brings Pareto optimal stable state as cooperative behavior, otherwise it is non cooperative behavior. So far, game theory has successfully found two kinds of games that may bring about cooperative behavior. The first is the anonymous theorem in infinite repeated games, which guarantees that the cooperative (refined) Nash equilibrium will appear when the players of the game have enough evaluation for the long-term interests. Second, assuming that the game participants do not know whether others are rational or not, it is possible for all of us to choose cooperative behavior when others are likely to be irrational.

However, economists and even other social scientists are extremely dissatisfied with the fact that human beings only show cooperative behavior under such harsh conditions. Because, the reason why human beings are far superior to other species in evolution is that human beings have different behaviors compared with other species, that is, human beings have cooperative behavior, or they can form cooperation on a larger scale than other species. This is the consensus of most social scientists, especially anthropologists.

So, where is the way out?

Some economists believe that mainstream economics has gone astray because of methodological errors. That is, mainstream economics decomposes economic activities into aggregate activities of consumers and manufacturers. And these economists assume that the behavior of the mainstream economists is the biggest interest of their own. Under this assumption, economists find that cooperative behavior is difficult to appear, and Pareto optimal is difficult to appear.

On the contrary, if we abandon the paradigm of human cooperation, we can adopt it instead. This is the route chosen by santafier school, or its research program or methodology. This is exactly what Professor Dong Zhiqiang tries to explain in his book "economics of behavior and evolution paradigm".

The santafier school is a school that studies scientific problems with holistic methodology rather than atomic methodology. Rather, they adopt the methodology of "individualism + holism". This is quite different from the individualism methodology of contemporary mainstream economics. They believe that human beings have a normative tendency, which leads to the fact that the overall rules can indeed affect the behavior of individuals (holism view), rather than as the mainstream economics insists: rules are the product of game interaction based on individual interests (individualism view). They believe that "group" is of great importance in human evolution, and there is the power of individual group selection at multiple levels. Human nature is the product of gene culture co evolution. It is a great pity that mainstream economics ignores these important aspects when considering human cooperation. In this book, Professor Dong Zhiqiang has spent quite a long time on discussing the efforts made by the santafi school on the important issue of how human cooperation is possible.

Of course, the santafi school is not limited to the study of cooperative behavior, even economics. Their research covers almost all fields of economics, including the micro mechanism of class formation in Marx's political economy. However, because I am more interested in cooperative behavior, I also think this issue is the most important economic issue. So, I'll just talk about some cooperative game related experience. Many problems faced by human society, such as war, trade war, environmental problems, epidemic control, and civilization conflict, are essentially cooperative behavior problems. Obviously, "cooperation" should be the central issue of social science. Thanks to Professor Dong Zhiqiang for his detailed interpretation of the ideas and methods of the santafi school, as well as his own unique theoretical contribution with important academic value.

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