Conditional punishment is a double-edged sword in promoting cooperation.

ABSTRACT: Punishment is widely recognized as an effective approach for averting from exploitation by free-riders in human society. However, punishment is costly, and thus rational individuals are unwilling to take the punishing action, resulting in the second-order free-rider problem. Recent experimental study evidences that individuals prefer conditional punishment, and their punishing decision depends on other members' punishing decisions. In this work, we thus propose a theoretical model for conditional punishment and investigate how such conditional punishment influences cooperation in the public goods game. Considering conditional punishers only take the punishing action when the number of unconditional punishers exceeds a threshold number, we demonstrate that such conditional punishment induce

SUBMITTER: Huang F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5764993 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature