Coordinating cooperation in stag-hunt game: Emergence of evolutionarily stable procedural rationality

2025-08-07

AI Summary

This paper addresses the cooperation coordination dilemma in the stag hunt game by investigating how human bounded rationality—via evolutionary mechanisms—can stabilize cooperative outcomes. We reformulate the classic stag hunt as a Coordination-II game and introduce “procedural rationality”: a bounded-rational strategy grounded in simple, local rules rather than global optimization. Using evolutionary game-theoretic modeling and population dynamic analysis, we demonstrate that procedural rationality constitutes an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) in the Coordination-II game, robust against invasion by fully rational strategies. Our key contribution is the first formal demonstration that agents with lower rationality are more likely to achieve and sustain stable cooperation—challenging conventional rational-choice assumptions. This provides a novel explanatory framework for the emergence of cooperation, particularly enriching theoretical accounts of cooperation origins in hunter-gatherer societies. (149 words)

Technology Category

• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Cooperative Game Theory
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Stochastic Optimization

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Sustainability of Web economics
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy

Abstract

Humans are bounded rational at best and this, we argue, has worked in their favour in the hunter-gatherer society where emergence of a coordinated action, leading to cooperation, is otherwise the standard stag-hunt dilemma (when individuals are rational). In line with the fact the humans strive for developing self-reputation by having less propensity to cheat than to be cheated, we observe that the payoff structure of the stag-hunt game appropriately modifies to that of coordination-II game. Subsequently, within the paradigm of evolutionary game theory, we establish that a population -- consisting of procedural rational players (a type of bounded rationality) -- is unequivocally evolutionarily stable against emergence of more rational strategies in coordination-II game. The cooperation is, thus, shown to have been established by evolutionary forces picking less rational individuals.

Problem

• Explores cooperation emergence in stag-hunt game dilemmas
• Analyzes bounded rationality's role in evolutionary stability
• Investigates payoff structure shift to coordination-II game

Innovation

• Procedural rationality ensures evolutionary stability
• Modified payoff structure promotes cooperation
• Bounded rationality favors coordinated actions