Adherence to public institutions that foster cooperation

Arunas L. Radzvilavicius, Taylor A. Kessinger and Joshua B. Plotkin ()
Additional contact information
Arunas L. Radzvilavicius: University of Pennsylvania
Taylor A. Kessinger: University of Pennsylvania
Joshua B. Plotkin: University of Pennsylvania

Nature Communications, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-14

Abstract: Abstract Humans typically consider altruism a moral good and condition their social behavior on the moral reputations of others. Indirect reciprocity explains how social norms and reputations support cooperation: individuals cooperate with others who are considered good. Indirect reciprocity works when an institution monitors and publicly broadcasts moral reputations. Here we develop a theory of adherence to public monitoring in societies where individuals are, at first, independently responsible for evaluating the reputations of their peers. Using a mathematical model, we show that adherence to an institution of moral assessment can evolve and promote cooperation under four different social norms, including norms that previous studies found to perform poorly. We determine how an institution’s size and its degree of tolerance towards anti-social behavior affect the rate of cooperation. Public monitoring serves to eliminate disagreements about reputations, which increases cooperation and payoffs, so that adherence evolves by social contagion and remains robust against displacement.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23783-9 Abstract (text/html)

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:nat:natcom:v:12:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-021-23783-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-23783-9

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().