The DOI matches its Crossref record; 11 of the 11 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The economics of altruistic punishment and the maintenance of cooperation
Open accessAbstract
Explaining the evolution and maintenance of cooperation among unrelated individuals is one of the fundamental problems in biology and the social sciences. Recent findings suggest that altruistic punishment is an important mechanism maintaining cooperation among humans. We experimentally explore the boundaries of altruistic punishment to maintain cooperation by varying both the cost and the impact of punishment, using an exceptionally extensive subject pool. Our results show that cooperation is only maintained if conditions for altruistic punishment are relatively favourable: low cost for the punisher and high impact on the punished. Our results indicate that punishment is strongly governed by its cost-to-impact ratio and that its effect on cooperation can be pinned down to one single variable: the threshold level of free-riding that goes unpunished. Additionally, actual pay-offs are the lowest when altruistic punishment maintains cooperation, because the pay-off destroyed through punishment exceeds the gains from increased cooperation. Our results are consistent with the interpretation that punishment decisions come from an amalgam of emotional response and cognitive cost–impact analysis and suggest that altruistic punishment alone can hardly maintain cooperation under multi-level natural selection. Uncovering the workings of altruistic punishment as has been done here is important because it helps predicting under which conditions altruistic punishment is expected to maintain cooperation.
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Citations
Cites
The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism
Trivers, R. L. (1971) · The Quarterly Review of Biology · doi:10.1086/406755 · Cited by 11,010
Altruistic punishment in humans
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Cooperation and Punishment in Public Goods Experiments
Fehr, E., & Gächter, S. (2000) · American Economic Review · doi:10.1257/aer.90.4.980 · Cited by 4,547 · cited 5×
“Previous work (Fehr & Gächter 2000, 2002), however, indicates that at least in environments where punishment is relatively cheap and has strong impact, the frequency of altruistic punishment is surprisingly high, stimulating high contribution rates in the public good game.”
BackgroundResultInfluentialFehr, E., & Fischbacher, U. (2003) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature02043 · Cited by 3,475 · cited 2×
“Our results (below) show that in the standard treatment the behaviour of our participants does not differ qualitatively from the behaviour of student participants in similar experiments (Fehr & Gächter 2000, 2002; Fehr & Fischbacher 2003).”
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The Neural Basis of Altruistic Punishment
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The evolution of altruistic punishment
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Reputation helps solve the ‘tragedy of the commons’
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Indirect reciprocity can stabilize cooperation without the second-order free rider problem
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The weirdest people in the world?
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010) · Behavioral and Brain Sciences · doi:10.1017/s0140525x0999152x · Cited by 12,641
Sustaining cooperation in laboratory public goods experiments: a selective survey of the literature
Chaudhuri, A. (2011) · Experimental Economics · doi:10.1007/s10683-010-9257-1 · Cited by 1,445
Why Do Investors Hold Socially Responsible Mutual Funds?
RIEDL, A., & SMEETS, P. (2017) · The Journal of Finance · doi:10.1111/jofi.12547 · Cited by 1,378
Self-citationSocial learning promotes institutions for governing the commons
Sigmund, K., De Silva, H., Traulsen, A., & Hauert, C. (2010) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature09203 · Cited by 580
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Rand, D. G., & Nowak, M. A. (2011) · Nature Communications · doi:10.1038/ncomms1442 · Cited by 350
Metadata
- Authors
- Egas, M., & Riedl, A.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
- Publisher
- The Royal Society
- Published
- 2008-01-15
- Volume
- 275
- Issue
- 1637
- Pages
- 871-878
- ISSN
- 0080-4649 (ISSN-L)
- 0962-8452
- 1471-2954
- OpenAlex
- W2142437362
- Cited by
- 453
- References
- 11
- FWCI
- 111.51
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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