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Punishment and Gossip: Sustaining Cooperation in a Public Goods Game

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Book cover Advances in Social Simulation

Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 229))

Abstract

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.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. ISTC-CNR, Roma, Italy

    Francesca Giardini, Mario Paolucci & Rosaria Conte

  2. IIIA-CSIC, Barcelona, Spain

    Daniel Villatoro

Authors
  1. Francesca Giardini
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  2. Mario Paolucci
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  3. Daniel Villatoro
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  4. Rosaria Conte
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Francesca Giardini .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Decision Analysis and Support, School of Economics Institute of Econometrics, Warsaw, Poland

    Bogumił Kamiński

  2. Division of Decision Analysis and Support, School of Economics, Institute of Econometrics, Warsaw, Poland

    Grzegorz Koloch

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© 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Giardini, F., Paolucci, M., Villatoro, D., Conte, R. (2014). Punishment and Gossip: Sustaining Cooperation in a Public Goods Game. In: Kamiński, B., Koloch, G. (eds) Advances in Social Simulation. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 229. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39829-2_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39829-2_10

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-39828-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-39829-2

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

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