Explaining how cooperation can emerge, and persist over time in various species is a prime challenge for both biologists and social scientists. Whereas cooperation in non-human species might be explained through mechanisms such as kinship selection or reciprocity, this is usually regarded as insufficient to explain the extent of cooperation observed in humans. It has been theorized that indirect reciprocity—I help you, and someone else later helps me—could explain the breadth of human cooperation. Reputation is central to this idea, since it conveys important information to third parties whether to cooperate or not with a focal player. In this paper we analyze a model for reputation dynamics through gossiping, and pay specific attention to the possible cooperation networks that may arise. We show that gossiping agents can organize into cooperative clusters, i.e. cooperate within clusters, and defect between them, which can be regarded as socially balanced. We also deduce conditions for these gossiping cooperators to be evolutionary stable.
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