Punish and perish
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5722158 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Angelo Antoci (0000-0003-3719-0437, University of Sassari, corresponding author), Luca Zarri (0000-0003-2464-3863, University of Verona) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 195-223 |
| Publication date | 2015-05-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Rationality and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1043-4631 • E-ISSN: 1461-7358 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/1043463115576138 |
| OpenAlex | W3124076067 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 38 |
The evolution of large-scale cooperation among strangers is a fundamental unanswered question in the social sciences. Behavioral economics has persuasively shown that the so-called strong reciprocity plays a key role in accounting for the endogenous enforcement of cooperation. Insofar as strongly reciprocal players are willing to costly sanction defectors, cooperation flourishes. However, experimental evidence unambiguously indicates that not only defection and strong reciprocity, but also unconditional cooperation without punishment is a quantitatively important behavioral attitude. By referring to a prisoner's dilemma framework where punishment ("stick") and rewarding ("carrot") options are available, here we show analytically that the presence of cooperators who don't punish in the population makes altruistic punishment evolutionarily weak. We show that cooperation breaks down and strong reciprocity is maladaptive if costly punishment means "punishing defectors" and, even more so, if it is coupled with costly rewarding of cooperators. In contrast, punishers do not perish if cooperators, far from being rewarded, are sanctioned. These results, based on an extended notion of strong reciprocity, challenge evolutionary explanations of cooperation that overlook the "dark side" of altruistic behavior
Dilemma · Economics · Enforcement · Epistemology · Game theory · Microeconomics · Political science · Population · Positive economics · Prisoner's dilemma · Reciprocal · Reciprocal altruism · Repeated game · Social dilemma · Sociology · Strong reciprocity · Culture, Economy, and Development Studies · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology
Choosing the Carrot or the Stick? Endogenous Institutional Choice in Social Dilemma Situations
Cooperation and Punishment in Public Goods Experiments
Social Preferences, Beliefs, and the Dynamics of Free Riding in Public Goods Experiments
The nature of human altruism
The Folk Theorem in Repeated Games with Discounting or with Incomplete Information
Antisocial Punishment Across Societies
The genetical evolution of social behaviour. I
Fairness perceptions and prosocial emotions in the power to take
Public Goods Provision and Sanctioning in Privileged Groups
An Intercultural Examination of Cooperation in the Commons
An Evolutionary Approach to Norms
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |