Abstract An Approach to Cooperat General-Sum Normal Form Steven Damer Department of Computer Science University of Minnesota, Minneapo damer@cs.umn.edu My primary research interest is social behavior for software agents to achieve cooperation in general-sum normalform games. An agent can easily be programmed to con-stantly cooperate in a normal form game, but such an agent is not suitable for environments with potentially hostile opponents. For a rational agent, the main reason to cooperate is to induce reciprocation; to reciprocate it is necessary to deter-mine which moves are cooperative. In constant-sum games cooperation is impossible because any gain by one agent is a loss by the other agent. In other games (such as Prisoner’s Dilemma) it is easy to identify cooperative moves because the opponent’s payoffs for that move strictly dominate the other moves of the agent. In general it is not easy to identify cooperative strategies in arbitrary general-sum games.