Commitment to Cooperation and Peer Punishment: Its Evolution

Tatsuya Sasaki, Isamu Okada, Satoshi Uchida and Xiaojie Chen
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Isamu Okada: Department of Business Administration, Soka University, Tokyo 192-8577, Japan
Satoshi Uchida: Research Center, RINRI Institute, Tokyo 101-8385, Japan
Xiaojie Chen: School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China

Games, 2015, vol. 6, issue 4, 1-14

Abstract: Theoretical and empirical studies have generally weighed the effect of peer punishment and pool punishment for sanctioning free riders separately. However, these sanctioning mechanisms often pose a puzzling tradeoff between efficiency and stability in detecting and punishing free riders. Here, we combine the key aspects of these qualitatively different mechanisms in terms of evolutionary game theory. Based on the dilemmatic donation game, we introduce a strategy of commitment to both cooperation and peer punishment. To make the commitment credible, we assume that those willing to commit have to make a certain deposit. The deposit will be refunded as long as the committers faithfully cooperate in the donation game and punish free riders and non-committers. It turns out that the deposit-based commitment offers both the efficiency of peer punishment and the stability of pool punishment and that the replicator dynamics lead to transitions of different systems: pool punishment to commitment to peer punishment.

Keywords: evolution of cooperation; peer punishment; pool punishment; commitment; refundable deposit (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C C7 C70 C71 C72 C73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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