Related papers: Non-participant externalities reshape the evolutio…

Situations where people have to decide between hurting themselves or another person are at the core of many individual and global conflicts. Yet little is known about how people behave when facing these situations in the lab. Here we report…

Non-binding communication is common in daily life and crucial for fostering cooperation, even though it has no direct payoff consequences. However, despite robust empirical evidence, its evolutionary basis remains poorly understood. Here,…

Human behavioural patterns exhibit selfish or competitive, as well as selfless or altruistic tendencies, both of which have demonstrable effects on human social and economic activity. In behavioural economics, such effects have…

Prosocial punishment has been proved to be a powerful mean to promote cooperation. Recent studies have found that social exclusion, which indeed can be regarded as a kind of punishment, can also support cooperation. However, if prosocial…

Cooperative behaviors are defined as the production of common goods benefitting all members of the community at the producer's cost. They could seem to be in contradiction with natural selection, as non-cooperators have an increased fitness…

Understanding the emergence of prosocial behaviours among self-interested individuals is an important problem in many scientific disciplines. Various mechanisms have been proposed to explain the evolution of such behaviours, primarily…

Cooperative behaviour has been extensively studied as a choice between cooperation and defection. However, the possibility to not participate is also frequently available. This type of problem can be studied through the optional public…

Indirect reciprocity maintains cooperation in stranger societies by mapping individual behaviors onto reputation signals via social norms. Existing theoretical frameworks assume static environments with constant resources and fixed payoff…

The conflict between individual and collective interests makes fostering cooperation in human societies a challenging task, requiring drastic measures such as the establishment of sanctioning institutions. These institutions are costly…

Participatory Design (PD) seeks political change to support people's democratic control over processes, solutions, and, in general, matters of concern to them. A particular challenge remains in supporting vulnerable groups to gain power and…

Punishment may deter antisocial behavior. Yet to punish is costly, and the costs often do not offset the gains that are due to elevated levels of cooperation. However, the effectiveness of punishment depends not only on how costly it is,…

In this paper, we study the problem of cost optimisation of individual-based institutional incentives (reward, punishment, and hybrid) for guaranteeing a certain minimal level of cooperative behaviour in a well-mixed, finite population. In…

The public goods game is a famous example illustrating the tragedy of the commons. In this game cooperating individuals contribute to a pool, which in turn is distributed to all members of the group, including defectors who reap the same…

Taxes are an essential and uniformly applied institution for maintaining modern societies. However, the levels of taxation remain an intensive debate topic among citizens. If each citizen contributes to common goals, a minimal tax would be…

We develop and apply epistemic tests to various decentralized governance methods as well as to study the impact of participation. These tests probe the ability to reach a correct outcome when there is one. We find that partial abstention is…

Human cooperation depends on indirect reciprocity. In this work, we explore the concept of indirect reciprocity using a donation game in an infinitely large population. In particular, we examine how updating the reputations of recipients…

Public goods game serves as a valuable paradigm for studying the challenges of collective cooperation in human and natural societies. Peer punishment is often considered as an effective incentive for promoting cooperation in such contexts.…

Public opinion is subject to peer interaction via social networks and external pressure from the media, advertising, and other actors. In this paper, we study the interaction between external and peer influence on the stochastic opinion…

Human ecological success relies on our characteristic ability to flexibly self-organize into cooperative social groups, the most successful of which employ substantial specialization and division of labor. Unlike most other animals, humans…

Punishment is an effective way to sustain cooperation among selfish individuals. In most of previous studies, objects of punishment are set to be defectors. In this paper, we propose a mechanism of punishment, in which individuals with the…