Rare but severe concerted punishment that favors cooperation

Kuiying Deng, Zhuozheng Li, Shun Kurokawa and Tianguang Chu

Theoretical Population Biology, 2012, vol. 81, issue 4, 284-291

Abstract: As one of the mechanisms that are supposed to explain the evolution of cooperation among unrelated individuals, costly punishment, in which altruistic individuals privately bear the cost to punish defection, suffers from such drawbacks as decreasing individuals’ welfare, inducing second-order free riding, the difficulty of catching defection, and the possibility of triggering retaliation. To improve this promising mechanism, here we propose an extended Public Goods game with rare but severe concerted punishment, in which once a defector is caught punishment is triggered and the cost of punishment is equally shared among the remainder of the group. Analytical results show that, when the probability for concerted punishment is above a threshold, cooperating is, while defecting is not, an evolutionarily stable strategy in finite populations, and that this way of punishment can considerably decrease the total cost of inhibiting defection, especially in large populations.

Keywords: Finite population; Fixation probability; Evolutionarily stable strategy; Public Goods game (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040580912000299
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:thpobi:v:81:y:2012:i:4:p:284-291

DOI: 10.1016/j.tpb.2012.02.005

Access Statistics for this article

Theoretical Population Biology is currently edited by Jeremy Van Cleve

More articles in Theoretical Population Biology from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().