Context-sensitive norm enforcement reduces sanctioning costs in spatial public goods games

Hsuan-Wei Lee, Colin Cleveland and Attila Szolnoki

Applied Mathematics and Computation, 2026, vol. 508, issue C

Abstract: Uniform punishment policies can sustain cooperation in social dilemmas but impose severe costs on enforcers, creating a second-order free-rider problem that undermines the very mechanism designed to prevent exploitation. We show that the remedy is not a harsher stick but a smarter one. In a four-strategy spatial public-goods game we pit conventional punishers, who levy a fixed fine, against norm-responsive punishers that double both fine and cost only when at least half of their current group already cooperates. Extensive large scale Monte Carlo simulations on lattices demonstrate that context-sensitive punishment achieves complete defector elimination at fine levels 15% lower than uniform enforcement, despite identical marginal costs per sanctioning event. The efficiency gain emerges because norm-responsive punishers conserve resources in defector-dominated regions while concentrating intensified sanctions at cooperative-defector boundaries, creating self-reinforcing fronts that amplify the spread of prosocial behavior. These findings reveal that enforcement efficiency can be dramatically improved by targeting punishment at cooperative-defector interfaces rather than applying uniform sanctions, offering quantitative guidelines for designing adaptive regulatory mechanisms that maximize compliance while minimizing institutional costs.

Keywords: Social dilemmas; Cooperation; Spatial public goods games; Context-sensitive punishment; Evolutionary game theory; Enforcement mechanisms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:apmaco:v:508:y:2026:i:c:s0096300325003522

DOI: 10.1016/j.amc.2025.129626

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