Mutual punishment promotes cooperation in the spatial public goods game

Han-Xin Yang and Zhihai Rong

Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, 2015, vol. 77, issue C, 230-234

Abstract: Punishment has been proved to be an effective mechanism to sustain cooperation among selfish individuals. In previous studies, punishment is unidirectional: an individual i can punish j but j cannot punish i. In this paper, we propose a mechanism of mutual punishment, in which the two individuals will punish each other if their strategies are different. Because of the symmetry in imposing the punishment, one might expect intuitively the strategy to have little effect on cooperation. Surprisingly, we find that the mutual punishment can promote cooperation in the spatial public goods game. Other pertinent quantities such as the time evolution of cooperator density and the spatial distribution of cooperators and defectors are also investigated.

Keywords: Cooperation; Public goods game; Punishment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:chsofr:v:77:y:2015:i:c:p:230-234

DOI: 10.1016/j.chaos.2015.06.002

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