An Evolutionary Model of Cooperation, Fairness and Altruistic Punishment in Public Good Games

We identify and explain the mechanisms that account for the emergence of fairness preferences and altruistic punishment in voluntary contribution mechanisms by combining an evolutionary perspective together with an expected utility model. We aim at filling a gap between the literature on the theory...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hetzer, Moritz, Sornette, Didier
Format: Online
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science 2013
Online Access:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3834069/
id pubmed-3834069
recordtype oai_dc
spelling pubmed-38340692013-11-20 An Evolutionary Model of Cooperation, Fairness and Altruistic Punishment in Public Good Games Hetzer, Moritz Sornette, Didier Research Article We identify and explain the mechanisms that account for the emergence of fairness preferences and altruistic punishment in voluntary contribution mechanisms by combining an evolutionary perspective together with an expected utility model. We aim at filling a gap between the literature on the theory of evolution applied to cooperation and punishment, and the empirical findings from experimental economics. The approach is motivated by previous findings on other-regarding behavior, the co-evolution of culture, genes and social norms, as well as bounded rationality. Our first result reveals the emergence of two distinct evolutionary regimes that force agents to converge either to a defection state or to a state of coordination, depending on the predominant set of self- or other-regarding preferences. Our second result indicates that subjects in laboratory experiments of public goods games with punishment coordinate and punish defectors as a result of an aversion against disadvantageous inequitable outcomes. Our third finding identifies disadvantageous inequity aversion as evolutionary dominant and stable in a heterogeneous population of agents endowed initially only with purely self-regarding preferences. We validate our model using previously obtained results from three independently conducted experiments of public goods games with punishment. Public Library of Science 2013-11-19 /pmc/articles/PMC3834069/ /pubmed/24260101 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0077041 Text en © 2013 Hetzer, Sornette http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
repository_type Open Access Journal
institution_category Foreign Institution
institution US National Center for Biotechnology Information
building NCBI PubMed
collection Online Access
language English
format Online
author Hetzer, Moritz
Sornette, Didier
spellingShingle Hetzer, Moritz
Sornette, Didier
An Evolutionary Model of Cooperation, Fairness and Altruistic Punishment in Public Good Games
author_facet Hetzer, Moritz
Sornette, Didier
author_sort Hetzer, Moritz
title An Evolutionary Model of Cooperation, Fairness and Altruistic Punishment in Public Good Games
title_short An Evolutionary Model of Cooperation, Fairness and Altruistic Punishment in Public Good Games
title_full An Evolutionary Model of Cooperation, Fairness and Altruistic Punishment in Public Good Games
title_fullStr An Evolutionary Model of Cooperation, Fairness and Altruistic Punishment in Public Good Games
title_full_unstemmed An Evolutionary Model of Cooperation, Fairness and Altruistic Punishment in Public Good Games
title_sort evolutionary model of cooperation, fairness and altruistic punishment in public good games
description We identify and explain the mechanisms that account for the emergence of fairness preferences and altruistic punishment in voluntary contribution mechanisms by combining an evolutionary perspective together with an expected utility model. We aim at filling a gap between the literature on the theory of evolution applied to cooperation and punishment, and the empirical findings from experimental economics. The approach is motivated by previous findings on other-regarding behavior, the co-evolution of culture, genes and social norms, as well as bounded rationality. Our first result reveals the emergence of two distinct evolutionary regimes that force agents to converge either to a defection state or to a state of coordination, depending on the predominant set of self- or other-regarding preferences. Our second result indicates that subjects in laboratory experiments of public goods games with punishment coordinate and punish defectors as a result of an aversion against disadvantageous inequitable outcomes. Our third finding identifies disadvantageous inequity aversion as evolutionary dominant and stable in a heterogeneous population of agents endowed initially only with purely self-regarding preferences. We validate our model using previously obtained results from three independently conducted experiments of public goods games with punishment.
publisher Public Library of Science
publishDate 2013
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3834069/
_version_ 1612028703036932096