Conditional neutral punishment promotes cooperation in the spatial prisoner's dilemma game

Qun Song, Zhaoheng Cao, Rui Tao, Wei Jiang, Chen Liu and Jinzhuo Liu

Applied Mathematics and Computation, 2020, vol. 368, issue C

Abstract: Punishment plays an important role in promoting cooperation. In real society, individuals tend to punish other players based on certain conditions rather than punish them directly. Thus, we introduce a conditional neutral punishment mechanism and study how this mechanism affects the evolution of cooperation. Namely, an individual can punish his/her neighbors with the opposite strategy when his/her payoff is lower than the average payoff of his/her neighbors. The simulation results show that this mechanism promotes cooperation effectively even with antisocial punishment. By adopting such a mechanism, cooperative punishers form shields to protect cooperators inside, while defective punishers hide behind defectors without punishing anyone.

Keywords: Conditional punishment; Strategy-neutral punishment; Evolutionary games; Social dilemmas; Cooperation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0096300319307908
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:apmaco:v:368:y:2020:i:c:s0096300319307908

DOI: 10.1016/j.amc.2019.124798

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Mathematics and Computation is currently edited by Theodore Simos

More articles in Applied Mathematics and Computation from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().