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

Abstract

Game theory provides a powerful means to study human cooperation and better understand cooperation-facilitating mechanisms in general. In classical game-theoretic models, an increase in group cooperation constantly increases people’s gains, implying that individual gains are a continuously varying function of the cooperation rate. However, this is inconsistent with the increasing number of risk-resistant scenarios in reality. A risk-resistant scenario means once a group does not successfully resist the risk, all individuals lose their resources, such as a community coping with COVID-19 and a village resisting a flood. In other words, individuals’ gains are segmented about the collaboration rate. This paper builds a risk-resistant model to explore whether punishment still promotes collaboration when people resist risk. The results show that central and peer punishments can both encourage collaboration but with different characteristics under different risk-resistant scenarios. Specifically, central punishment constrains the collaboration motivated by peer punishment regardless of risk, while peer punishment limits the collaboration induced by central punishment only when the risk is high. Our findings provide insights into the balance between peer punishment from public autonomy and central punishment from central governance, and the proposed model paves the way for the development of richer risk-resistant models.

The coordination of collective and individual solutions in risk-resistant scenarios

“…Whether in group cooperation or group collaboration, the conflict between the individual’s pursuit of self-interest and the preservation of collective interest is always present [ 20 , 51 – 57 ]. When risk strikes, collective joint response to risk and individual solo response to risk become contradictory [ 17 , 18 ]. The individual coping with risk on its own is a deformation of individual self-interest in the risk-resistance scenario.…”