Players acting as leaders in turn improve cooperation

Abstract

Cooperation behaviour is an important topic in society as well as in the biological field, and many factors yield cooperation. Many social phenomena constitute Stackelberg games, but there is little literature on the relationship between Stackelberg games and cooperation. This article shows that in the repeated dynamic Stackelberg games, players acting as leaders in turn yields cooperation. Moreover, social welfare is improved correspondingly when players act as leaders in turn. Therefore, for dynamic Stackelberg games, this paper proposes that the institution of players acting as leaders in turn promotes cooperation.