Adherence to public institutions that foster cooperation

Abstract

Humans typically consider altruism a moral good and condition their social behavior on the moral reputations of others. Indirect reciprocity explains how social norms and reputations support cooperation: individuals cooperate with others who are considered good. Indirect reciprocity works when an institution monitors and publicly broadcasts moral reputations. Here we develop a theory of adherence to public monitoring in societies where individuals are, at first, independently responsible for evaluating the reputations of their peers. Using a mathematical model, we show that adherence to an institution of moral assessment can evolve and promote cooperation under four different social norms, including norms that previous studies found to perform poorly. We determine how an institution’s size and its degree of tolerance towards anti-social behavior affect the rate of cooperation. Public monitoring serves to eliminate disagreements about reputations, which increases cooperation and payoffs, so that adherence evolves by social contagion and remains robust against displacement.

The evolution of moral rules in a model of indirect reciprocity with private assessment

“…This is because the property of these rules that allow them to converge toward full cooperation, also makes them vulnerable to errors. This result suggests that private assessment rules could not evolve when errors are frequent, and that public assessment for instance supported by an institution could be preferred in this case 21 . However, this result is mitigated by two points.…”

“…For instance, strategies C-1 and C-3 differ in their rules about good individuals defecting with bad individuals ( ) but they still end up with full cooperation at equilibrium. This adds long-term interactions to the list of mechanisms which can explain the evolution of indirect reciprocity when assessment is private, alongside empathy 20 , pleasing 28 and public institutions 21 .…”

“…Indeed, disagreement between individual opinions can itself result in future interactions being judged differently by the actor and an observer, fuelling more disagreement. As a result, previous work that considered private assessment or individual assessment rules limited their analysis to a small set of strategies, usually the ones that have been shown successful in models with public assessment 18 – 21 . Recently, 22 developed a model to explore the success of a large number of assessment rules against strategies that always cooperate or defect 23 .…”

Authority or Autonomy? Exploring Interactions between Central and Peer Punishments in Risk-Resistant Scenarios

“…Behavioral economics has proposed various game models [ 16 , 17 , 18 ] that vividly demonstrate the conflict between the group cooperation and the individual free-riding behavior, such as the dictator game [ 19 , 20 , 21 ], public goods game [ 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 ], prisoner’s dilemma game [ 20 , 26 , 27 ], etc. In addition, various measures have been proposed to promote cooperation and find a way out of the social dilemma [ 13 , 22 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 ].…”

“…Therefore, it is a long-standing hotspot for cooperation researchers to solve different social dilemmas. In terms of who initiated the action, punishment can be enforced either by a central agency [ 28 , 41 , 42 , 43 ] or individuals [ 38 , 44 , 45 ]. One salient form of punishment we can observe is usually from sanctioning institutions, such as police stations, tax offices, and courts.…”