Evolution of conditional cooperation in public good games
Open accessAbstract
Cooperation declines in repeated public good games because individuals behave as conditional cooperators. This is because individuals imitate the social behaviour of successful individuals when their payoff information is available. However, in human societies, individuals cooperate in many situations involving social dilemmas. We hypothesize that humans are sensitive to both success (payoffs) and how that success was obtained, by cheating (not socially sanctioned) or good behaviour (socially sanctioned and adds to prestige or reputation), when information is available about payoffs and prestige. We propose and model a repeated public good game with heterogeneous conditional cooperators where an agent's donation in a public goods game depends on comparing the number of donations in the population in the previous round and with the agent's arbitrary chosen conditional cooperative criterion. Such individuals imitate the social behaviour of role models based on their payoffs and prestige. The dependence is modelled by two population-level parameters: affinity towards payoff and affinity towards prestige . These affinities influence the degree to which agents value the payoff and prestige of role models. Agents update their conditional strategies by considering both parameters. The simulations in this study show that high levels of cooperation are established in a population consisting of heterogeneous conditional cooperators for a certain range of affinity parameters in repeated public good games. The results show that social value (prestige) is important in establishing cooperation.
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Negative reciprocity can be switched to positive reciprocity given sufficient cooperation levels.
“Our novel alternative to punishment builds on the reciprocal nature of the trust—the fact that people reciprocate voluntary trust68—as well as the conditional nature of human cooperation—the fact that negative reciprocity can be switched to positive reciprocity given sufficient cooperation levels44,69–71.”
From Cooperation without punishment (2023) · cites this paper as [70]
The Model section says simulated agents donate when donations in the previous round exceed their individual threshold, and the Discussion says stable cooperation requires a critical amount of cooperation. This supports a threshold-dependent shift toward cooperation, but the paper does not establish that negative reciprocity in humans switches to positive reciprocity. (LLM, conf=0.84)
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Research works printed but not linked: 2
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- [42]Battu B, Srinivasan N 2020 Data from: Evolution of conditional cooperation in public good games Dryad Digital Repository. See https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.f7m0cfxrc. PMC7277267 32537191 · DOI
Cited by
Sorted by citations
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Self-citation
- Authors
- Battu, B., & Srinivasan, N.
- Affiliations
- University of Allahabad (IN)
- Corresponding author
- Battu, Balaraju
- Srinivasan, Narayanan
- Venue
- Royal Society Open Science
- Publisher
- The Royal Society
- Published
- 2020-05
- Volume
- 7
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 191567
- ISSN
- 2054-5703 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC7277267
- OpenAlex
- W3025188972
- Cited by
- 15
- References
- 41
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 1 · 2021: 2 · 2020: 1
- FWCI
- 2.34
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Locations
- Royal Society Open Science (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Cadmus - EUI Research Repository (European University Institute) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Management Science and Operations Research › Game Theory and Applications
- Keywords
- conditional cooperation, public goods game, repeated games, social dilemmas, imitation, role models, prestige, reputation, payoff information, social values, evolution of cooperation
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