Tactical cooperation of defectors in a multi-stage public goods game

Abstract With a linear public goods game played in six different variants, this article studies two channels that might moderate social dilemmas and increase cooperation without using pecuniary incentives: moral framing and shaming. We find that cooperation is increased when noncontributing to a public good is framed as morally debatable and socially harmful tax avoidance, while the mere description of a tax context has no effect. However, without social sanctions in place, cooperation quickly deteriorates due to social contagion. We find ‘shaming’ free-riders by disclosing their misdemeanor to act as a strong social sanction, irrespective of the context in which it is applied. Moralizing tax avoidance significantly reinforces shaming, compared with a simple tax context.

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Punishment Strategies across Societies: Conventional Wisdoms Reconsidered

Games ◽

10.3390/g12030063 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 12 (3) ◽

pp. 63

Author(s):

Ramzi Suleiman ◽

Yuval Samid

Keyword(s):

Public Goods ◽

Strong Predictor ◽

Social Environments ◽

Public Goods Game ◽

The Public ◽

Free Riders ◽

The World ◽

Emergence Of Cooperation ◽

Using Data ◽

The Cost

Experiments using the public goods game have repeatedly shown that in cooperative social environments, punishment makes cooperation flourish, and withholding punishment makes cooperation collapse. In less cooperative social environments, where antisocial punishment has been detected, punishment was detrimental to cooperation. The success of punishment in enhancing cooperation was explained as deterrence of free riders by cooperative strong reciprocators, who were willing to pay the cost of punishing them, whereas in environments in which punishment diminished cooperation, antisocial punishment was explained as revenge by low cooperators against high cooperators suspected of punishing them in previous rounds. The present paper reconsiders the generality of both explanations. Using data from a public goods experiment with punishment, conducted by the authors on Israeli subjects (Study 1), and from a study published in Science using sixteen participant pools from cities around the world (Study 2), we found that: 1. The effect of punishment on the emergence of cooperation was mainly due to contributors increasing their cooperation, rather than from free riders being deterred. 2. Participants adhered to different contribution and punishment strategies. Some cooperated and did not punish (‘cooperators’); others cooperated and punished free riders (‘strong reciprocators’); a third subgroup punished upward and downward relative to their own contribution (‘norm-keepers’); and a small sub-group punished only cooperators (‘antisocial punishers’). 3. Clear societal differences emerged in the mix of the four participant types, with high-contributing pools characterized by higher ratios of ‘strong reciprocators’, and ‘cooperators’, and low-contributing pools characterized by a higher ratio of ‘norm keepers’. 4. The fraction of ‘strong reciprocators’ out of the total punishers emerged as a strong predictor of the groups’ level of cooperation and success in providing the public goods.

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Emergence of cooperation with reputation-updating timescale in spatial public goods game

Physics Letters A ◽

10.1016/j.physleta.2021.127173 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 393 ◽

pp. 127173

Author(s):

Weiwei Han ◽

Zhipeng Zhang ◽

Junqing Sun ◽

Chengyi Xia

Keyword(s):

Public Goods ◽

Public Goods Game ◽

Emergence Of Cooperation

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Cooperation and competition between pair and multi-player social games in spatial populations

Scientific Reports ◽

10.1038/s41598-021-91532-5 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Attila Szolnoki ◽

Xiaojie Chen

Keyword(s):

Public Goods ◽

Evolutionary Game Theory ◽

Evolutionary Game ◽

Pair Interaction ◽

Public Goods Game ◽

Point Interactions ◽

Social Games ◽

The Public ◽

Specific Parameter ◽

Group Members

AbstractThe conflict between individual and collective interests is in the heart of every social dilemmas established by evolutionary game theory. We cannot avoid these conflicts but sometimes we may choose which interaction framework to use as a battlefield. For instance some people like to be part of a larger group while other persons prefer to interact in a more personalized, individual way. Both attitudes can be formulated via appropriately chosen traditional games. In particular, the prisoner’s dilemma game is based on pair interaction while the public goods game represents multi-point interactions of group members. To reveal the possible advantage of a certain attitude we extend these models by allowing players not simply to change their strategies but also let them to vary their attitudes for a higher individual income. We show that both attitudes could be the winner at a specific parameter value. Interestingly, however, the subtle interplay between different states may result in a counterintuitive evolutionary outcome where the increase of the multiplication factor of public goods game drives the population to a fully defector state. We point out that the accompanying pattern formation can only be understood via the multipoint or multi-player interactions of different microscopic states where the vicinity of a particular state may influence the relation of two other competitors.

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