Economic theory, I argue, has focused almost entirely on how economic agents compete with each other, in market economies and in games. But competition does not exhaust our economic behavior: humans cooperate in many economic situations, and they often achieve better results than they could through competition. Although game theorists have attempted to incorporate cooperative behavior into their standard template (namely, by explaining cooperation as the Nash equilibrium of a multistage game), I believe that this explanation of cooperation is unconvincing. more recently, behavioral economists have rebelled against such an explanation and have argued that explaining cooperation requires dropping the standard assumption of economic theory, that economic agents are self-interested or selfregarding. The behavioral economists’ explanation of cooperation, while replacing self-regarding preferences with ones that include as arguments the welfare of others or a conception of fairness, still relies upon the main tool of conventional game theory: Nash equilibrium.

我认为，经济理论几乎完全集中在经济主体如何在市场经济和博弈中相互竞争。但竞争并没有耗尽我们的经济行为：人类在许多经济情况下进行合作，而且他们往往比通过竞争获得更好的结果。尽管博弈论者试图将合作行为纳入他们的标准模板中（即通过将合作解释为多阶段博弈的纳什均衡），我认为这种合作解释是不可信的。最近，行为经济学家反对这种解释，认为解释合作需要放弃经济理论的标准假设，即经济主体是自利或自私自利的。行为经济学家对合作的解释，虽然用包括他人福利或公平概念作为论据的自利偏好，但仍然依赖于传统博弈论的主要工具：纳什均衡。