The "Favors Game": A Framework to Study the Emergence of Cooperation Through Social Importance

Several agent-based frameworks have been proposed to investigate the possible reasons that lead humans to act in the interest of others while giving up individual gains. In this paper we propose a novel framework for analyzing this phenomenon based on the notions of social importance and local discrimination. We propose a "favors game", where a recipient agent can "claim" a favor to a donor agent, which may in turn "confer" its request at the expense of a certain cost. The proposed framework allows us to study the conditions under which cooperation occurs and the dynamics of the relationships formed within a population.