Cooperation and defection are the two strategies that are at the heart of every social dilemma. While cooperators contribute to the collective welfare at a personal cost, defectors choose not to. The Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) game, in particular, has been widely used to model a situation in which mutual cooperation leads to the best outcome in social terms, but defectors can benefit the most individually. Due to the lower individual fitness of cooperators, selection pressure acts in favor of defectors so that, according to the principles of Darwinian selection, cooperation extinction is inevitable. However, cooperation is indeed observed in biological and social systems alike: the evolutionary origin of cooperation remains a unsolved puzzle. 

A key point is that the way in which individuals adapt their behavior (usually referred to as evolutionary dynamics or strategy update) is unknown a priori. Most theoretical studies in this field build on update rules based on payoff comparison, which fit in the framework of biological evolution where payoff is understood as fitness and thus reproductive success. However they are questionable for a socio/economic context where individuals aware of others' actions but often do not know how much they benefit from them. Indeed, large-scale experiments with humans playing a spatial PD game show that humans do not consider neighbors' payoffs when making their decisions. Rather, they respond to the cooperation that they observe in a reciprocal manner: they are more likely to cooperate if, in the previous round, many of their neighbors and themselves did so – a behavior known as moody conditional cooperation (MCC), while they ignore the context and free-ride with high probability if they did not.

In this work we studied how MCC could arise from evolution. We performed an extensive analysis of different evolutionary dynamics for players' behavioral traits, from imitative rules where players simply copy the strategies of others if they get higher payoffs, to rational strategies in which players adopt the Best Response to what others do, and Reinforcement Learning strategies where players use their experience to choose or avoid certain actions based on their consequences. We find that MCC can be explained only by people learning from what they experience, and not for instance from the information they may gather on others. Another important outcome of experiments is that the shape of the network of interactions among players does not influence cooperative behavior. In this work we showed that the absence of network reciprocity is a general consequence of evolutionary dynamics that do not take neighbors' payoffs into account. 

Network Games are used to model contexts, ranging from public goods provision to information collection, where a player’s well-being depends on own action as well as on the actions taken by her neighbors. Many of the game-theoretic applications studied in the economic literature can be classified into two canonical types of interactions:

• Strategic Substitutes, where a player would prefer that someone of her neighbors cooperates (rather than taking that action herself), but she would be willing to cooperate if nobody in the neighborhood does, and thus represent an anti-coordination game.

• Strategic Complements, which arise whenever the benefit that an individual obtains from cooperating is greater as more of her partners do the same, and thus represent a coordination game.