Reward from Punishment Does Not Emerge at All Costs

Jeromos Vukov, Flávio Pinheiro, Francisco C Santos and Jorge M Pacheco

PLOS Computational Biology, 2013, vol. 9, issue 1, 1-6

Abstract: The conundrum of cooperation has received increasing attention during the last decade. In this quest, the role of altruistic punishment has been identified as a mechanism promoting cooperation. Here we investigate the role of altruistic punishment on the emergence and maintenance of cooperation in structured populations exhibiting connectivity patterns recently identified as key elements of social networks. We do so in the framework of Evolutionary Game Theory, employing the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Stag-Hunt metaphors to model the conflict between individual and collective interests regarding cooperation. We find that the impact of altruistic punishment strongly depends on the ratio q/p between the cost of punishing a defecting partner (q) and the actual punishment incurred by the partner (p). We show that whenever q/p

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002868 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article/fil ... 02868&type=printable (application/pdf)

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:plo:pcbi00:1002868

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002868

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS Computational Biology from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ploscompbiol ().