title: Apology and forgiveness evolve to resolve failures in cooperative agreements.
abstract: Making agreements on how to behave has been shown to be an evolutionarily viable strategy in one-shot social dilemmas. However, in many situations agreements aim to establish long-term mutually beneficial interactions. Our analytical and numerical results reveal for the first time under which conditions revenge, apology and forgiveness can evolve and deal with mistakes within ongoing agreements in the context of the Iterated Prisoners Dilemma. We show that, when the agreement fails, participants prefer to take revenge by defecting in the subsisting encounters. Incorporating costly apology and forgiveness reveals that, even when mistakes are frequent, there exists a sincerity threshold for which mistakes will not lead to the destruction of the agreement, inducing even higher levels of cooperation. In short, even when to err is human, revenge, apology and forgiveness are evolutionarily viable strategies which play an important role in inducing cooperation in repeated dilemmas.
authors.affiliation: AI lab, Computer Science Department, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, Brussels, 1050 Belgium.|MLG, Département d'Informatique, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Boulevard du Triomphe CP212, Brussels, 1050 Belgium.
authors.forename: Luis A
authors.initials: LA
authors.lastname: Martinez-Vaquero
authors.affiliation: School of Computing, Teesside University, Borough Road, Middlesbrough, TS1 3BA, UK.
authors.forename: The Anh
authors.initials: TA
authors.lastname: Han
authors.affiliation: NOVA Laboratory for Computer Science and Informatics, Departamento de Informática, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Caparica, 2829-516 Portugal.
authors.forename: Luís Moniz
authors.initials: LM
authors.lastname: Pereira
authors.affiliation: AI lab, Computer Science Department, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, Brussels, 1050 Belgium.|MLG, Département d'Informatique, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Boulevard du Triomphe CP212, Brussels, 1050 Belgium.
authors.forename: Tom
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Lenaerts
mesh_terms: D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D061347:Forgiveness; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations