Scale-free growth of human society based on cooperation and altruistic punishment

Boris Podobnik, Andrijana Musura Gabor and Ivona Skreblin Kirbis

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2019, vol. 513, issue C, 613-619

Abstract: Selfishness and cooperation are the key elements in evolution. Recently, it has been shown experimentally that the altruistic punishment of defectors where punishments bring no material gain for punisher is a key motive for the explanation of cooperation. Here we study how punishment and cooperation among the subjects of a system affect the growth of the entire system where we propose an evolution mechanism by merging scale-free growth and game theory. The subjects cooperate, defect and altruistically punish each other, where the increase of the level of punishment makes the system more cooperative. We derive under which conditions the system grows, what is the speed of growth, and for which condition the system can even collapse. For a set of countries we analyse how depending on the level of corruption a country punishes those who brake the traffic rule. We perform a survey to identify what should be a punishment for those who ride without the ticket in public transportation.

Keywords: Econophysics; Social dynamics; Growth model; Network theory; Game theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437118311191
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

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:phsmap:v:513:y:2019:i:c:p:613-619

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2018.08.170

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().