ABSTRACT
So far, we have discussed two accounts of reciprocity with arguments aimed at illustrating the dynamics of its emergence in the cases that have relevance to civil life.
The emergence of reciprocity has thus been represented by employing two logics which, while different, have in common the agent’s expectation or request that the other player (or players) participating in the interaction will also choose a strategy of reciprocity. We labelled this sort of expectation ‘conditionality’ and showed that while it fully applies to the first kind of reciprocity, it becomes more faded, and even willing to take the first step and forgive with ‘philía-reciprocity’; even in this second case, however, the decision of an agent X to follow the strategy of reciprocity is conditioned to the suitably reliable expectation that Y will do the same: ‘Even purely selfish employers have an incentive to make a generous job offer, if they expect sufficiently many workers to behave in a reciprocal manner’ (Fehr and Gätcher 2000, p. 12).1 As mentioned in Chapter 1, the various theories of strong reciprocity suggest that the subjects are generally willing to punish those who do not reciprocate, even when there is a cost to pay, but we remain, as seen, within the domain of conditionality.
