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Abstract

Cooperation, where individuals pay costs that benefit the entire community, can be found on all levels of biological and social organization - from cooperation between genes within a genome via sharing costly extracellular products in microbial populations to cooperation within animal and human societies. In the short run, it would be advantageous for an individual to withhold cooperation in all these cases. In this way, it can exploit the contributions of other, but it would no longer have to pay its own share. If such behaviour spreads through imitation or inheritance, cooperation and thus a common good is at risk. However, cooperation can be stabilised by various mechanisms that are analysed in detail in theoretical biology. A particularly interesting case are situations in which threshold values have to be reached in order to obtain the advantages of cooperation - in these situations, cooperation can become a problem of coordinating towards a particular solution. How sharp these thresholds are can be a crucial factor in order to stabilize solutions.