Evolutionary Dynamics of Cooperation in a Corrupt Society with Anti-Corruption Control

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (03) ◽  
pp. 2150039
Author(s):  
Linjie Liu ◽  
Xiaojie Chen

The importance of cooperation is self-evident to humans, yet the existence of corruption where law violators can avoid being punished by paying bribes to corrupt law enforcers may threaten the maintenance of cooperation. Although powerful monitoring has been used to resolve such matters, existing studies show that the effects of such measures are either transient or uncertain. Thus how to efficiently control the occurrence of corruption for the emergence of cooperation remains a challenge. Here, we introduce social exclusion into the public goods game, and respectively propose three measures to control corruption, namely, the exclusion of corrupt punishers, the exclusion of corrupt defectors, and the exclusion of both corrupt punishers and corrupt defectors. Our results show that the system dynamics driven by these three measures can exhibit many interesting dynamical outcomes including the dominance of defectors, rock-scissors-paper cycle, heteroclinic cycle, or interior attractor. We further demonstrate that excluding corrupt punishers can improve the situation of corruption more efficiently than excluding corrupt defectors. In addition, excluding both corrupt defectors and corrupt punishers can more effectively promote the emergence of cooperation for a broad parameter range.

Games ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 63
Author(s):  
Ramzi Suleiman ◽  
Yuval Samid

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.


2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (11) ◽  
pp. 2127-2149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linjie Liu ◽  
Xiaojie Chen ◽  
Attila Szolnoki

Pro-social punishment is a key driver of harmonious and stable society. However, this institution is vulnerable to corruption since law-violators can avoid sanctioning by paying bribes to corrupt law-enforcers. Consequently, to understand how altruistic behavior survives in a corrupt environment is an open question. To reveal potential explanations here, we introduce corrupt enforcers and violators into the public goods game with pool punishment, and assume that punishers, as corrupt enforcers, may select defectors probabilistically to take a bribe from, and meanwhile defectors, as corrupt violators, may select punishers stochastically to be corrupted. By means of mathematical analysis, we aim to study the necessary conditions for the evolution of cooperation in such corrupt environment. We find that cooperation can be maintained in the population in two distinct ways. First, cooperators, defectors, and punishers can coexist by all keeping a steady fraction of the population. Second, these three strategies can form a cyclic dominance that resembles a rock-scissors-paper cycle or a heteroclinic cycle. We theoretically identify conditions when the competing strategies coexist in a stationary way or they dominate each other in a cyclic way. These predictions are confirmed numerically.


2021 ◽  
Vol 393 ◽  
pp. 127173
Author(s):  
Weiwei Han ◽  
Zhipeng Zhang ◽  
Junqing Sun ◽  
Chengyi Xia

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Attila Szolnoki ◽  
Xiaojie Chen

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.


2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (10) ◽  
pp. 103105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linjie Liu ◽  
Shengxian Wang ◽  
Xiaojie Chen ◽  
Matjaž Perc

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