Individual mobility promotes punishment in evolutionary public goods games

Abstract

In explaining the pressing issue in biology and social sciences how cooperation emerges in a population of self-interested individuals, researchers recently pay intensive attentions to the role altruistic punishment plays. However, as higher-order cooperators, survival of punishers is puzzling due to their extra cost in regulating norm violators. Previous works have highlighted the importance of individual mobility in promoting cooperation. Yet its effect on punishers remains to be explored. In this work we incorporate this feature into modeling the behavior of punishers, who are endowed with a choice between leaving current place or staying and punishing defectors. Results indicate that optimal mobility level of punishers is closely related to the cost of punishing. For considerably large cost, there exists medium tendency of migration which favors the survival of punishers. This holds for both the direct competition between punishers and defectors and the case where cooperators are involved, and can also be observed when various types of punishers with different mobility tendencies fight against defectors simultaneously. For cheap punishment, mobility does not provide with punishers more advantage even when they are initially rare. We hope our work provide more insight into understanding the role individual mobility plays in promoting public cooperation.

Seasonal payoff variations and the evolution of cooperation in social dilemmas

“…During the last decade, methods of statistical physics and network science [26][27][28][29] have been successfully integrated into the mainstream research concerning the evolution of cooperation, revealing that the structure of the interaction network can be crucial [30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44]. It has also been thoroughly established that heterogeneity in general, for example in the form of heterogeneous networks, noisy payoff disturbances, or other individual properties like the teaching activity or the mobility to connect to additional other players, strongly promotes cooperation [45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58].…”

Giant Catalytic Effect of Altruists in Schelling’s Segregation Model

“…Many models have shown that pair interactions between selfish players lead to stationary states of low utility. They have introduced various types of altruistic behavior to investigate how it may lead to a better equilibrium: altruistic punishment [14,15], inequity aversion [17], fraternal attitudes [18], agent mobility [19] . .…”

Blocking defector invasion by focusing on the most successful partner

“…Several mechanisms have already been identified, which highlight the importance of different forms of reciprocity [9]. As expected, monitoring players by rewarding positive act or punishing bad behavior supports cooperation efficiently [10,11,12,13,14]. Notably, the punishment can be executed in different ways like by decreasing payoff or via exclusion from mutual benefit [15,16,17].…”