296 M. Hoffman et al
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296 M. Hoffman et al.
Temptation
to Defect
aes Cons Gon.
(1) (2) (3) (4)
X
Fig. 3. A single stage of the Envelope Game
is arepeated game with two players. In each round, player 1 receives a sealed enve-
lope, which contains a card stating the costs of cooperation (high temptation to
defect vs. low temptation to defect). The temptation is assigned randomly and is
usually low. Player 1 can choose to look inside the envelope and thus find out the
magnitude of the temptation or choose not to look. Then player 1 decides to cooper-
ate or to defect. Subsequently, player 2 can either continue to the next round or end
the game. As in the Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma, the interaction repeats with a
given likelihood, and if it does, an envelope is stuffed with a new card and presented
to player 1, etc.
In this model, as long as temptations are rare, large, and harmful to player 2, it is
a Nash equilibrium for player 1 to “cooperate without looking” in the envelope and
for player 2 to continue if and only if player 1 has cooperated and not looked. We
refer to this as the cooperate without looking (CWOL) equilibrium.” This equilibrium
emerges in agent-based simulations of evolution and learning processes.’ Notice
that if player 1 could not avoid looking inside the envelope, or player 2 could not
observe whether player 1 looked, there would not be a cooperative equilibrium
since player 1 would benefit by deviating to defection in the face of large tempta-
tions. Not looking permits cooperative equilibria in the face of large temptations.
The Envelope Game is meant to capture the essential features of many interest-
ing aspects of our morality, as described next.
Authentic Altruism. Many have asked whether “[doing good is] always and exclu-
sively motivated by the prospect of some benefit for ourselves, however subtle”
(Batson, 2014), for example, the conscious anticipation of feeling good (Andreoni,
? Technically, the conditions under which we expect players to avoid looking and attend to looking
are c,>a/(l—w)>cp+c(1—p) and bp+d(1—p)<0), where c, and c, are the magnitudes of the
high and low temptations, respectively; p is the likelihood of the low temptation; a/(1—w) is the
value of a repeated, cooperative interaction to player 1; and bp+d(1—p) is the expected payoff to
player 2 if player 1 only cooperates when the temptation is low.
>The simulations employ numerical estimation of the replicator dynamics for a limited strategy
space: cooperate without looking, cooperate with looking, look and cooperate only when the temp-
tation is low, and always defect for player 1, and end if player 1 looks, end if player 1 defects, and
always end for player 2.
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015508
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