Costly signals can facilitate cooperation and punishment in the prisoner’s dilemma

Kaixuan Guan, Yuyou Chen, Wanjun Zheng, Lulu Zeng and Hang Ye

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2022, vol. 605, issue C

Abstract: Costly signal is regarded as one of the mechanisms to explain the emergence of cooperation. Both the cost of cooperation and the cost of punishment can be seen as expensive cost signals. Previous research has used costly signaling theory to explain the establishment of cooperation and punishment in public goods game. However, punishment is less likely to emerge stably in the prisoner’s dilemma, and the punisher cannot have additional information to identify and punish the defector. Therefore, it is particularly important to further study whether the expensive cost signal in the prisoner’s dilemma can promote the emergence of cooperation and punishment. We distinguish between costly punishing signals and costly cooperative signals in this paper to look at the rule that turns payoff into fitness. The findings reveal that, without punishment, if the costly signal is weak and the cost of cooperation is not too high compared to the benefit of cooperation, cooperation is a better choice than defection. With punishment, if there is a small amount of noise in the costly signaling mechanism and punishment is considered a more expensive signal than cooperation, punishment is a better strategy.

Keywords: Cooperation; Punishment; Evolutionary game theory; Costly signaling theory; The prisoner’s dilemma (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437122006252
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:605:y:2022:i:c:s0378437122006252

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2022.127997

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 ().