Reputation effects drive the joint evolution of cooperation and social rewarding

Saptarshi Pal () and Christian Hilbe
Additional contact information
Saptarshi Pal: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology
Christian Hilbe: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology

Nature Communications, 2022, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-11

Abstract: Abstract People routinely cooperate with each other, even when cooperation is costly. To further encourage such pro-social behaviors, recipients often respond by providing additional incentives, for example by offering rewards. Although such incentives facilitate cooperation, the question remains how these incentivizing behaviors themselves evolve, and whether they would always be used responsibly. Herein, we consider a simple model to systematically study the co-evolution of cooperation and different rewarding policies. In our model, both social and antisocial behaviors can be rewarded, but individuals gain a reputation for how they reward others. By characterizing the game’s equilibria and by simulating evolutionary learning processes, we find that reputation effects systematically favor cooperation and social rewarding. While our baseline model applies to pairwise interactions in well-mixed populations, we obtain similar conclusions under assortment, or when individuals interact in larger groups. According to our model, rewards are most effective when they sway others to cooperate. This view is consistent with empirical observations suggesting that people reward others to ultimately benefit themselves.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-33551-y Abstract (text/html)

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:nat:natcom:v:13:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-022-33551-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-33551-y

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().