The economic analysis of a Q-learning model of Cooperation with punishment.

A Q-learning model is devised in order to see whether individuals can "learn" how to cooperate, when a virtuous system of punishment and reinforcement is adopted. The paper shows that, if it is possible to free-ride and not being adequately punished, there will always be an incentive to deviate from cooperation. Conversely, even if the others did not cooperate, it is still possible to have someone who cooperates when individuals are pushed by strong intrinsec motivations. Cooperation can be a learning process. It is possible to trigger a learning process that leads individuals to be equally cooperative. This happens much more easily, the more responsible the individuals are. It also depends on proper punishment

Quantum Entanglement and the Emergence of Collaboration in Social Media

In this paper, we devise a slightly modified version of the vote with the wallet game used by Becchetti et al. [L. Becchetti and F. Salustri, The vote with the wallet as a multiplayer prisoner’s dilemma, CEIS Tor Vergata Research Paper No. 359, Vol. 13, Issue 10, Centre for Economic and International Studies, Rome, Italy (2015); L. Becchetti, V. Pelligra and F. Salustri, Testing for heterogeneity of preferences in randomized experiments: A satisfaction-based approach applied to multiple prisoner dilemmas, Appl. Econ. Lett. 24(10) (2017) 722–726] for the use of social media, where the player decides whether to responsibly share social knowledge or not. We follow the point of view of Bennet and Bennet [D. Bennet and A. Bennet, Social learning from the inside out: The creation and sharing of knowledge from the mind/brain perspective, in Social Knowledge: Using Social Media to Know What You Know, eds. J. P. Girard and J. L. Girard (IGI Global, 2011), pp. 1–23] according to which another social settings may emerge through the so-called “process of collaborative entanglement.” In this environment, members of a community interact continuously with strong emotional feelings to combine the sources of knowledge and the beneficiaries of that knowledge and move toward a common direction. The application of the model to the quantum game theory substantially confirms that the cooperative strategy becomes the optimal one depending on the frequency of interactions and people’s cultural, geographical and social reachability and traceability