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Cited by 1,114

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 27 of the 27 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Volunteering as Red Queen Mechanism for Cooperation in Public Goods Games

Open access
Hauert, Christoph, De Monte, Silvia, Hofbauer, Josef, Sigmund, Karl·2002·Science

Abstract

The evolution of cooperation among nonrelated individuals is one of the fundamental problems in biology and social sciences. Reciprocal altruism fails to provide a solution if interactions are not repeated often enough or groups are too large. Punishment and reward can be very effective but require that defectors can be traced and identified. Here we present a simple but effective mechanism operating under full anonymity. Optional participation can foil exploiters and overcome the social dilemma. In voluntary public goods interactions, cooperators and defectors will coexist. We show that this result holds under very diverse assumptions on population structure and adaptation mechanisms, leading usually not to an equilibrium but to an unending cycle of adjustments (a Red Queen type of evolution). Thus, voluntary participation offers an escape hatch out of some social traps. Cooperation can subsist in sizable groups even if interactions are not repeated, defectors remain anonymous, players have no memory, and assortment is purely random.

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Crossref · 10.1126/science.1070582

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Metadata

Authors
Hauert, C., De Monte, S., Hofbauer, J., & Sigmund, K.
Venue
Science
Published
2002-05-10
Volume
296
Issue
5570
Pages
1129-1132
ISSN
  • 0036-8075 (ISSN-L)
  • 1095-9203
OpenAlex
W2151136700
Cited by
1,114
References
27
FWCI
70.29
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Volunteering as Red Queen Mechanism for Cooperation in Public Goods Games. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1126/science.1070582
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Hauert, C., De Monte, S., Hofbauer, J., & Sigmund, K. (2002). Volunteering as Red Queen Mechanism for Cooperation in Public Goods Games. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1070582

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.