Social Control and the Social Contract: The Emergence of Sanctioning Systems for Collective Action

Abstract

Punishment of free-riders is generally viewed as an important factor in promoting cooperation. But since it is often costly to sanction exploiters, the emergence of such a behavior and its stability raise interesting problems. Players who do not contribute to the sanctions, but profit from the increased level of cooperation caused by them, act as "second-order exploiters" and threaten the joint enterprise. In this paper, we review the role of voluntary participation in establishing and upholding cooperation with or without punishment. In particular, we deal with two distinct forms of punishment, namely peer punishment and pool punishment, and compare their stability and their efficiency. The emergence and upkeep of collaborative undertakings can strongly depend on whether participation is voluntary or mandatory. The possibility to opt out of a joint enterprise often helps in curbing exploiters and boosting pro-social behavior.Keywords Evolutionary game theory · Public goods games · Cooperation · Costly punishment · Social dilemma · Voluntary interactions For online experimentation, we refer to http://www.hanneloredesilva.at/sanctions and the VirtualLabs at

The evolution of sanctioning institutions: an experimental approach to the social contract

“…Whereas in the latter, an amount r/m of a player's contribution returns to the player, in the MA game players do not obtain any return from their own contribution. In Sigmund et al 2010Sigmund et al , 2011, the Mutual Aid game has been called the 'others only' variant of the Public Goods game. In our setup, the number of participants m can fluctuate.…”

“…We assume that this payoff is somewhere between the payoff obtained if no one contributes to the MA game, and that obtained if everyone contributes to the common pool (and, in the Pool game, to the punishment pool). This means For the competition between peer-punishment and pool-punishment, Sigmund et al (2010Sigmund et al ( , 2011 show, using arguments from evolutionary game theory, that in the first-order variant, peer-punishers prevail most of the time, but sometimes second-order free-riders invade. In this case, defectors and then non-participants take over before peer-punishment is reestablished.…”

“…A county would have to pay its sheriff even if nobody commits a crime. We tried to model this as 'pool-punishment' (for experimental papers, see Yamagishi 1986;Guillen et al 2006;Kamei et al 2011;Markussen et al 2011;Traulsen et al 2012; for theory, see Sigmund et al 2010Sigmund et al , 2011. Players who want to use such a sanctioning tool have to pay a fee, even before the joint enterprise takes place, or at least before they are informed of its outcome, and thus before they know whether there will be any exploiters to punish.…”

Games of corruption: How to suppress illegal logging

“…In some situations, 57 individual players directly punish defectors (peer punishment;Fowler, 2005; Bochet et al, 58 2006;Cinyabuguma et al, 2006;Gürerk et al, 2006;Ertan et al, 2009). 59Alternatively, players may establish a costly police-like system for punishing defectors, which 60 is specialized on spotting and fining defectors (pool punishment; Yamagishi, 1984; VanVugt 61 et al, 2009;Kamei et al, 2011;Sigmund et al, 2011;Andreoni and Gee, 2012; Traulsen et 62 al., 2012). For such a system to function effectively, the hired rule enforcers (or inspectors, 63 officers, janitors, sheriffs) have to work properly.…”

“…To secure the investments required for establishing and maintaining 496 such an authority, players may voluntarily pool their resources (resulting in so-called 'pool 497 punishment'; e.g., Sigmund et al, 2010), or the sanctioning institution may levy an 498 inescapable tax from all players (resulting in so-called 'institutional punishment'; e.g., Sasaki 499 et al, 2012). Theoretical models and lab experiments show that, whereas institutionalized 500 forms of sanctioning are generally less efficient than self-justice, they tend to be more stable 501 Markussen et al, 2011;Puttermann et al, 2011;Sigmund et al, 2011; 502 Traulsen et al, 2012; Zhang et al, 2013). The voluntary commitment of harvesters to an 503 enforcer service we have considered here is a minimalistic form of a sanctioning institution 504 organized according to the principles of pool punishment.…”