Punishment and gossip: Sustaining cooperation in a Public Goods Game

In an environment in which free-riders are better off than cooperators, social control is required to foster and maintain cooperation. There are two main paths through which social control can be applied: punishment and reputation. Our experiments explore the efficacy of punishment and reputation on cooperation rates, both in isolation and in combination. Using a Public Goods Game, we are interested in assessing how cooperation rates change when agents can play one of two different reactive strategies, i.e., they can pay a cost in order to reduce the payoff of free-riders, or they can know others' reputation and then either play defect with free-riders, or refuse to interact with them. Cooperation is maintained at a high level through punishment, but also reputation-based partner selection proves effective in maintaining cooperation. However, when agents are informed about free-riders' reputation and play Defect, cooperation decreases. Finally, a combination of punishment and reputation-based partner selection leads to higher cooperation rates. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.

Publication type: 
Contributo in volume
Author or Creator: 
Giardini, Francesca
Paolucci, Mario
Villatoro, Daniel
Conte, Rosaria
Source: 
9th Conference of the European Social Simulation Association, ESSA 2013, pp. 107–118, 2014
Date: 
2014
Resource Identifier: 
http://www.cnr.it/prodotto/i/281434
https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39829-2_10
info:doi:10.1007/978-3-642-39829-2_10
http://www.scopus.com/record/display.url?eid=2-s2.0-84901005700&origin=inward
urn:isbn:9783642398285
Language: 
Eng
ISTC Author: 
rosaria.conte's picture
Real name: 
Mario Paolucci's picture
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