People Cooperate Today in Order to Meet More Cooperators Tomorrow presented by Mari Rege Research Department, Statistics Norway People frequently find themselves in various types of prisoners dilemma situations. This paper explains why a person may choose to cooperate in a prisoners dilemma type situation even when he knows that he will never play against this person again. A person may choose to cooperate because cooperation increases the future likelihood of meeting cooperators. After two people have played the prisoners dilemma there is a possibility for networking.
Cooperators talk to each other about cooperators that they have met in previous periods.
If A succeeds in pre-matching B, then A and B will play the prisoners dilemma against each other in period t. In each period all people in the society who did not succeed in pre-matching are randomly matched with each other. By behaving cooperatively people expand their network of cooperative people. The analysis shows that the probability of matching with a cooperator is larger for a cooperator than a non-cooperator, given that all cooperators adapt to the networking convention described above. Whether it is payoff maximizing to cooperate will depend on the share of cooperators in the society.