Deterrence through punishment can resolve collective risk dilemmas in carbon emission games

Abstract

Collective risk social dilemmas are at the heart of the most pressing global challenges we are facing today, including climate change mitigation and the overuse of natural resources. Previous research has framed this problem as a public goods game (PGG), where a dilemma arises between short-term interests and long-term sustainability. In the PGG, subjects are placed in groups and asked to choose between cooperation and defection, while keeping in mind their personal interests as well as the commons. Here, we explore how and to what extent the costly punishment of defectors is successful in enforcing cooperation by means of human experiments. We show that an apparent irrational underestimation of the risk of being punished plays an important role, and that for sufficiently high punishment fines, this vanishes and the threat of deterrence suffices to preserve the commons. Interestingly, however, we find that high fines not only avert freeriders, but they also demotivate some of the most generous altruists. As a consequence, the tragedy of the commons is predominantly averted due to cooperators that contribute only their “fair share” to the common pool. We also find that larger groups require larger fines for the deterrence of punishment to have the desired prosocial effect.

The evolution of cooperation in the unidirectional division of labour on a tree network

“…However, in reality, there is perception bias. In Jiang et al [36], it is stated through a human experiment that even though the subjective perception of being sanctioned is often less than the actual threat of being sanctioned, the higher threat regardless makes the population choose cooperation more. In our future studies, we will introduce a new assumption about risk perception and investigate the effects of subjective risk perception of sanctions in the evolution of cooperation in the division of labour.…”

“…In addition to these, the utilization of sanctions to enforce cooperation has also been investigated both theoretically and empirically (e.g. [32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44]).…”

Evolution of conditional cooperation in collective-risk social dilemma with repeated group interactions

“…Previous experimental and theoretical studies have revealed that high risk stimulates individuals' willingness to cooperate, thereby promoting the achievement of collective goals [32,[37][38][39][40]. Recent studies have incorporated factors such as costly punishment [41] and communication [42] into the collective-risk social dilemma game model and also applied it to address carbon emissions.…”