Human Cooperative Behavior And An Analysis Framework Of Cooperative Economics

Unlike any other species, humans often cooperate with genetically unrelated strangers in large groups. This kind of behavior is puzzling from an evolutionary perspective because cooperating individuals incur individual costs to confer benefits on unrelated group members. This unique phenomenon has been wide concerned by many scholars in biology, sociology, anthropology, economics and other fields. However, it is undeniable that the existing systems of economics are based on competition and cooperation has not been received the same attention as competition. It is very inadequate to describe and explain about cooperation in economics. This is an obvious deficiency of economics. In fact, every thing contains a variety of characters, and to understand each character requires specific perspective. In many cases, cooperation and competition has become two different property of a behavior, just like the two sides of a coin, and the neglect of any side will result in incomplete understanding about human behavior. Therefore, it is not exclusive and complete to take the perspective of competition in traditional economics. To blend cooperation, the other corresponding side of competition in human nature, into the basic theory of economics, will build a solid basis for economics.At present, there are a lot of researches on human cooperative behaviors in foreign countries, but these studies still have not formed a system. The domestic researches often introduce and imitate about foreign studies and lack innovation. Therefore, I intend to conduct systematic analysis of human cooperation and try to make a breakthrough in some basic research and build initially an analysis framework about cooperative economics. Some conclusions in this paper is illuminating and be able to enrich our understanding of human behavior. The basic idea of this paper is to analyze focusing closely on human cooperation by standardized research methods of economics. Shaoan Huang(2000) brings forward the main theoretical components of cooperative economics, but I do not want to explore and discuss all of these. I will focus on the most important and pressing questions in order to achieve some theoretical breakthrough in a short period. This paper consists of seven chapters. Chapter one Introduction. This chapter mainly introduces the questions of purpose, significance, structure, innovations and other issues. In addition, I introduce a number of writings of classical writers on human cooperative behavior from the viewpoint of the history of economic, such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Mancur Olson, etc.Chapter two Related Categories and Factors Influencing Community's Cooperation. This chapter mainly defines some related categories with cooperation and reviews the most concerned factors which influence the cooperation of communities based on the latest evidences of laboratory experiment and field study in literatures. Community heterogeneity is generally found to be detrimental to cooperation. Community size and wealth inequality is less clear-cut, although in general both of them seem to reduce cooperation. Good institutional arrangements in groups, such as the existence of a forum for discussions, the ability to punish deviators and to monitor agent of community, the well-defined distribute and management rules can improve the ability of groups to cooperate.Chapter three Review about the Theory of Strong Reciprocity. In this chapter, I first introduce the role of strong reciprocity in the maintenance of the order of human cooperation, then review recent progress in the theory of strong reciprocity, includes the question of why the theory of strong reciprocity come into being, the evidences of strong reciprocity, the biological basis of strong reciprocity, determination of punitive behavior of strong reciprocator, and the evolution of strong reciprocity. At the end, I review lectures about the theory of strong reciprocity.Chapter four Expansion of the Theory of Strong Reciprocity: Some Social Mechanisms of Improving the Ability of Punishment and Maintenance of Cooperation in Human Groups. One important condition for the stable evolution of strong reciprocity is that strong reciprocator can carry out severe punishment to betrayer at a low cost. But the reality is that the punisher is not always the opponent of the traitor. If human do not be able to inflict serious punishment at a low cost, it is very difficult to insist the faith of relying on punishment to maintain cooperation within the groups. Therefore, it is very important to discuss the evolution of strong reciprocity at more relaxed conditions. In this chapter, I analyze more deeply a number of social mechanisms of enhancing the ability of punishment, which is internalization of norms, alliance and the intervention of third-party. Based on the model of Gintis (2000), I build a simple mathematical model to analyze the impact of the above-mentioned three mechanisms on the evolution of altruistic punishment and cooperation in groups. The model implies that these three mechanisms can make strong reciprocity survive at a wider range of conditions if a single punisher can not meet the condition of the stable evolution of punishment. Thus our work further expands the present study.Chapter five An Analytical Framework of Cooperative Economics. Some basic issues about the theory of cooperative economics are discussed in this paper. In reality, there are substantial examples which can not be explained by the self-interest model of economic theory dominated by competition. So we try to incorporate fairness into the assumption of "economic agent" to build cooperative economics, for which we provide some scientific evidences in detail. We also discuss the basic theories and the basic Methodologies of cooperative economics. In the next two chapters, I will introduce the firm theory and economic growth theory of cooperative economics.Chapter six The Nature of Firm: an Analytical Framework Based on the Perspective of Cooperation. As to the nature of firm, those explanations that excessively relying on transaction costs can not put insight into its nature. The nature of firm should have a richer content. James S. Coleman (1990) considers that when group members have personal motives to adopt behavior to reduce the total welfare of the group, the criterion about acts will be generated. From this perspective, without choices of betrayal in the Prisoner's Dilemma game, it will be superfluous of the state, law, customs, norms, organizations and various institutions in our society to a large extent. Therefore, any institution has its cooperative property, firm is in no exception of course. Firm can be abstracted to a group of institutional arrangements which can control the game between employers and employees. When discussing the nature of firm, we try to probe into cooperation mechanism of firm centered on cooperation instead of on transaction costs. We found that through a series of governance mechanisms such as effects of the long-term game, reputation effects and incentive and punitive effects, firms make employees implement a higher level of effort, furthermore, bring a higher output. Meanwhile, employers are willing to pay employees more. As a result, firms jump out of the Prisoner's Dilemma and accomplish the cooperation between employers and employees.Chapter seven Cooperation in Economic Growth. All of literatures about human cooperation are concentrated in the micro-level. Since cooperation can promote efficiency and improve the utility of economic entities, what we concern is that what's the accumulated effect of the entire community's cooperation, and that to what extent the contributions are made by the overall cooperation actions to economic growth? As far as we know, there is no research which studies the effect of cooperation on the economic growth from the macro point of view. Therefore, this paper puts the factor of cooperation into the economic growth theory using the standard economic methods. Then I build an endogenous economic growth model containing the factors of cooperation, capital, labor and knowledge.