Related papers: Non-participant externalities reshape the evolutio…

Finding ways to overcome the temptation to exploit one another is still a challenge in behavioural sciences. In the framework of evolutionary game theory, punishing strategies are frequently used to promote cooperation in competitive…

Understanding the origins of volunteerism and free-riding is crucial in collective action situations where a sufficient number of cooperators is necessary to achieve shared benefits, such as in vaccination campaigns and social change…

Punishment as a mechanism for promoting cooperation has been studied extensively for more than two decades, but its effectiveness remains a matter of dispute. Here, we examine how punishment's impact varies across cooperative settings…

Actions such as sharing food and cooperating to reach a common goal have played a fundamental role in the evolution of human societies. These good actions may not maximise the actor's payoff, but they maximise the other's payoff.…

Economic experiments have shown that punishment can increase public goods game contributions over time. However, the effectiveness of punishment is challenged by second-order freeriding and antisocial punishment. The latter implies that…

While the benefits of common and public goods are shared, they tend to be scarce when contributions are provided voluntarily. Failure to cooperate in the provision or preservation of these goods is fundamental to sustainability challenges,…

Experimental studies have shown the ubiquity of altruistic behavior in human societies. The social structure is a fundamental ingredient to understand the degree of altruism displayed by the members of a society, in contrast to…

For societies to produce or safeguard public goods, costly voluntary contributions are often required. From the perspective of each individual, however, it is advantageous not to volunteer such contributions, in the hope that other…

The origin of altruistic behavior, i.e. the behavior that is useful for a population or a species but goes at the expense of an altruistic individual, has long been a challenge for students of evolutionary biology. The populations with…

Many mechanisms behind the evolution of cooperation, such as reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, and altruistic punishment, require group knowledge of individual actions. But what keeps people cooperating when no one is looking? Conformist…

Recently, reputation-based indirect reciprocity has been widely applied to the study on fairness behavior. Previous works mainly investigate indirect reciprocity by considering compulsory participation. While in reality, individuals may…

Evolution of cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma and the public goods game is studied, where initially players belong to two independent structured populations. Simultaneously with the strategy evolution, players whose current utility…

Both conventional wisdom and empirical evidence suggests that arranging a prior commitment or agreement before an interaction enhances the chance of reaching mutual cooperation. Yet it is not clear what mechanisms can promote the…

Pro-social punishment, whereby cooperators punish defectors, is often suggested as a mechanism that maintains cooperation in large human groups. Importantly, models that support this idea have to date only allowed defectors to be the target…

Building ethical machines may involve bestowing upon them the emotional capacity to self-evaluate and repent on their actions. While apologies represent potential strategic interactions, the explicit evolution of guilt as a behavioural…

Economic studies have shown that there are two types of regulation schemes which can be considered as a vital part of today's global economy: self-regulation enforced by self-regulation organizations to govern industry practices, and…

Monitoring with implicated punishment is common in human societies to avert freeriding on common goods. But is it effective in promoting public cooperation? We show that the introduction of monitoring and implicated punishment is indeed…

Societies consisting of cooperative individuals seem to require for their continuing success that defectors be policed. The precise connection between punishers and benefits, population structure, and division of labour, however, remains…

When individuals interact in groups, the evolution of cooperation is traditionally modeled using the framework of public goods games. These models often assume that the return of the public good depends linearly on the fraction of…

Analyses of voting algorithms often overlook informational externalities shaping individual votes. For example, pre-polling information often skews voters towards candidates who may not be their top choice, but who they believe would be a…