The article „Gossip: Perspective Taking to Establish Cooperation" by Simone Righi and Károly Takács has been published in Dynamic Games and Applications.

Available online here: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13235-022-00440-4

Abstract:

Problems of cooperation are frequent among living organisms, but they are difficult to solve.Humans have been able to produce large-scale cooperation among unrelated individualsthrough reputation systems. A challenging puzzle, however, is how reputation can guidebehavior if in most cases it is not shared publicly and is assigned to others privately. We con-firm that it is difficult to obtain cooperation among agents playing the Prisoner’s Dilemmawhen reputations are individually assigned. We propose that third-party communication (gos-sip) can overcome this difficulty, but only under specific conditions concerning its content,amount and persistence. We show that—in order to sustain cooperation—gossip should notonly be about private evaluations of others but should also include perspective taking andexchange of information about tolerance thresholds to support cooperation. This perspec-tive taking reputational strategy can propagate and establish cooperation in the populationindependent of gossip frequency and population size, under various selection mechanismsof communication partners and targets, and assumptions concerning agents’ memory.
 
Keywords Cooperation · Prisoner’s Dilemma · Indirect reciprocity · Gossip · Reputation