The Five Rules of Cooperation

Nowak's mathematics of working together

The big idea

A cooperative act costs C to its performer and yields B to its recipient. Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics has shown five conditions under which cooperation beats defection — and each maps onto win-win public policy.

By the end of this week you can

—State all five rules and what each variable means.
—Identify which rule a given policy is using.
—Explain why cooperation needs a mechanism, not an appeal.

Lecture hall · Week VI

The Five Rules of Cooperation

Plate 01 · leading message · use ← → keys

Plate 01

Cooperation is not a mood. It is an inequality.

B is the benefit to the recipient, C the cost to the performer. Cooperation spreads only when the ratio B/C clears a threshold set by the mechanism in play.

B / C > threshold

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Slides

Reading notes · Week VI

What you took from the pages

Write your own notes once you have finished SuperCooperators, then revisit them before class. Notes are private to your account and never seen by anyone else.

← Week V

The Evolutionarily Stable Strategy

Week VII →

Capital, Labor, and Why Pure Capitalism Is Not Stable