Punishment diminishes the benefits of network reciprocity in social dilemma experiments
Abstract
The evolution of cooperation has a formative role in human societies—civilized life on Earth would be impossible without cooperation. However, it is unclear why cooperation would evolve in the first place because Darwinian selection favors selfish individuals. After struggling with this problem for >150 y, recent scientific breakthroughs have uncovered multiple cooperation-promoting mechanisms. We build on these breakthroughs by examining whether two widely known cooperation-promoting mechanisms—network reciprocity and costly punishment—create synergies in a social dilemma experiment. While network reciprocity fulfilled its expected role, costly punishment proved to be surprisingly ineffective in promoting cooperation. This ineffectiveness suggests that the rational response to punishment assumed in theoretical studies is overly stylized and needs reexamining.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Dec 19, 2017
- Source ID
- 10.1073/pnas.1707505115
Entities
People
- Boris Podobnik
- H. Eugene Stanley
- Huijia Li
- Lei Shi
- Marko Jusup
- Shlomo Havlin
- Stefano Boccaletti
- Xuelong Li
- Zhen Wang
Organizations
- Bar-Ilan University
- Boston University
- Central University of Finance and Economics
- Chinese Academy of Sciences
- Hokkaido University
- Luxembourg School of Business
- Northwestern Polytechnical University
- Tokyo Institute of Technology
- University of Rijeka
- Yunnan University of Finance and Economics
- Zagreb School of Economics and Management