Conditional punishment is a double-edged sword in promoting cooperation

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 induces the effect of a double-edged sword on the evolution of cooperation both in well-mixed and structured populations. Specifically, when it is relatively easy for conditional punishers to engage in the punishment activity corresponding to a low threshold value, cooperation can be promoted in comparison with the case without conditional punishment. Whereas when it is relatively difficult for conditional punishers to engage in the punishment activity corresponding to a high threshold value, cooperation is inhibited in comparison with the case without conditional punishment. Moreover, we verify that such double-edged sword effect exists in a wide range of model parameters and can be still observed in other different punishment regimes.

• Publication year

  2018

• Venue

  Scientific Reports

• Publication date

  2018-01-11

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Economics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1038/s41598-017-18727-7PMID 29323286PMCID 5764993
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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