Reward and cooperation in the spatial public goods game

By Attila Szolnoki, Matjaz Perc. arXiv.org, 2010

636 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The promise of punishment and reward in promoting public cooperation is debatable. While punishment is traditionally considered more successful than reward, the fact that the cost of punishment frequently fails to offset gains from enhanced cooperation has lead some to reconsider reward as the main catalyst behind collaborative efforts. Here we elaborate on the “stick vs. carrot” dilemma by studying the evolution of cooperation in the spatial public goods game, where besides the traditional cooperators and defectors, rewarding cooperators supplement the array of possible strategies. The latter are willing to reward cooperative actions at a personal cost, thus effectively downgrading pure cooperators to second-order free-riders due to their unwillingness to bear these additional costs. Consequently, we find that defection remains viable, especially if the rewarding is costly. Rewards, however, can promote cooperation, especially if the synergetic effects of cooperation are low. Surprisingly, moderate rewards may promote cooperation better than high rewards, which is due to the spontaneous emergence of cyclic dominance between the three strategies.

Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b8e01ff6c81bade9c6549c0f6379c201627d3405

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In Management Science and Operations Research

In Safety Research

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Citations in the corpus

Cyclic dominance in evolutionary games: a review (2014, background): “Examples include the stabilization of reward [70] and punishment [66] in structured populations, the evolution o f empathy and fairness in human bargaining [154], as well as an oscillatory coexistence of defection and cooperation with the “tit-for-tat” strategy [156, 157].”
Statistical physics of human cooperation (2017, background): “In addition to continuous phase transitions, discontinuous phase transitions are also common in models of human cooperation, occurring for example as a consequence of indirect territorial competition [110], or the spontaneous emergence of cyclic dominance [60,192].”