Cooperation and Harmony in Finite Games

Abstract

Game harmony is a generic game property that describes how harmonious (non-conflictual) or disharmonious (conflictual) the interests of players are, as embodied in the payoffs. It can be used to predict the relative degree of cooperation in games of different harmony. For a large enough increase in harmony, all benevolent social welfare functionals converge to the utilitarian social welfare functional, and the utilitarian solution is always a pure Nash equilibrium and acquires further desirable properties of payoff and risk dominance. As a result, utilitarian cooperation is increasing, or at least non-decreasing, in harmony.

Keywords: Cooperation, game harmony, social welfare functionals, utilitarianism

JEL Classification: C72, D63, D64