Information Cascades and the Collapse of Cooperation
The article talks about how in many communities, newcomers often select who they want to interact with based on some role-model and interact with who the role-model interact with. Their goals are to interact with the cooperators and not the cheaters. However, there are both cooperators and cheaters in the network and the newcomers cannot distinguish between them. Therefore, the newcomers’ decisions are often based on the private and the public information that are available to them. And in this article, the authors discuss how attachment choices cascade down the generations and lead, or not, to a collapse of cooperation using game theory.
In the setup of this article, the public information available to the newcomers can be obtained by observing the network and choices that previous newcomers have made. The private information is modelled by two Gaussian probability distributions, one for cooperators and one for the cheaters. And the decision made on combination of private and public information can create information cascades which can detrimentally impact the newcomers especially when the cascade is wrong.
In the lectures we have been talking about a cascade may start and how a cascade could be wrong. Similar to the setup of the marble cascade, the newcomers only know the decisions made by the previous newcomers just like how the students only know the decision made by the previous student. The newcomers also have private information (modelled by Gaussian models) like the students have their private information (the color of the marble they draw). In both scenarios, an information cascade can start which might lead people to the wrong decision (collapse of cooperation) even when the reasoning is rational.
Reference:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-64800-z