Cooperation

Cooperation, co-operation, or coöperation, refers to the practice of people or greater entities working in common with commonly agreed-upon goals and possibly methods, instead of working separately in competition.

Cooperation is the antithesis of competition, however, the need or desire to compete with others is a very common impetus that motivates individuals to organize into a group and cooperate with each other in order to form a stronger competitive force.

Cooperation in many areas such as, farming and housing may be in the form of a cooperative or, alternately, in the form of a conventional business.

Many people support cooperation as the ideal form of management of human affairs. In terms of individuals obtaining goods and services, rather than resorting to theft or confiscation, they may cooperate by trading with each other or by altruistic sharing.

Certain forms of cooperation are illegal in some jurisdictions because they alter the nature of access by others to economic or other resources. Thus, cooperation in the form of cartels or price-fixing may be illegal.

A few mechanisms have been suggested for the appearance of cooperation between humans or in natural systems.

The Prisoner's Dilemma
Even if all members of a group would benefit if all cooperate, individual self-interest may not favor cooperation. The prisoner's dilemma codifies this problem and has been the subject of much research, both theoretical and experimental. Results from experimental economics show that humans often act more cooperatively than strict self-interest would seem to dictate.

One reason for this may be that if the prisoner's dilemma situation is repeated (see iterated prisoner's dilemma), it allows non-cooperation to be punished more, and cooperation to be rewarded more, than the single-shot version of the problem would suggest. It has been suggested that this is one reason for the evolution of complex emotional and social behavior in higher animals.

There are four main conditions that tend to be necessary for cooperative behaviour to develop between two individuals:
 * An overlap in desires
 * A chance of future encounters with the same individual
 * Memory of past encounters with that individual
 * A value associated with future outcomes

The Market Effect
The model relies on the fact that in many situations there exists a trade off between efficiency obtaining a desired resource and the amount of resources one can actively obtain. In that case, it could be worth it for each partner in a system to specialize in producing a specific resource and obtain the other resource by trade. When only two partners exist, each can specialize in one resource, and trade for the other. Trading for the resource requires cooperation with the other partner and includes a process of bidding and bargaining. This model can also be applied to a multi-partner system, in which the owner of a resource has the power to chose its cooperation partner. This model can be applied in natural systems (examples exist in the world of apes, cleaner fish, and more). Easy for exemplifying, though, are systems from international trading. Arabic countries control vast amounts of oil, but seek technologies from western countries. These in turn are in need of arab oil. The solution is cooperation by trade.