Abstract:

The promotion of cooperation and fair competition is one of the key questions in economics and management science. Most of previous studies in this field applied game theory method. These studies often designed management mechanism based on the Nash equilibrium analysis. However, people in reality are boundedly rational and often deviate from the Nash equilibrium. In recent years, data driven analysis for human cooperation and competition behaviors becomes one of the mainstream directions of economics and management science. This paper provides a survey of this field. We first introduce some theoretical and data driven methods for analyzing human behavior and mechanism design, including Nash equilibrium analysis, evolutionary game theory, cooperative game theory, behavioral economics, experimental economics, psychology, and neuroscience methods. Then we discuss internal factors, external factors, and institutional factors that may affect human cooperation and competition. For internal factors, we focus on prosocial preferences, such as altruism, reciprocity, fairness, and trust. We summarize related empirical results and discuss the neural and evolutionary mechanisms of these prosocial preferences. For external factors, we focus on the influences of social norm, network structure, and information structure on cooperation and competition. For institutional factors, we discuss the effects of different types of reputation mechanisms and incentive mechanisms. Finally, some challenging questions in this field are discussed.

Key words: game theory, behavioral economics, cooperation, competition