Positive Interactions Promote Public Cooperation
Open accessAbstract
Carrots Are Better Than Sticks: The challenge of dealing with freeloaders—who benefit from a common good but refuse to pay their “fair share” of the costs—has often been met in theoretical and laboratory studies by sanctioning costly punishment, in which contributors pay a portion of their benefit so that freeloaders lose theirs. Rand et al. (p. 1272 ; see the news story by Pennisi and the cover) added a private interaction session after each round of the public goods game during which participants were allowed to reward or punish other members of their group. The outcome showed that reward was as effective as punishment in maintaining a cooperative mindset, and doing so via rewarding interactions allowed the entire group to prosper because less is lost to the costs of punishing.
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Several techniques, such as sanctioning defectors or rewarding cooperators, tend to increase cooperative behaviour in laboratory experiments using economic games.
“Several techniques, such as sanctioning defectors 187 or rewarding cooperators 188 , tend to increase cooperative behaviour in laboratory experiments using economic games.”
From Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response (2020) · cites this paper as [188]
An alternative mechanism to punishing free-riders is to reward cooperators.
“Instead of punishing free-riders, an alternative mechanism is to reward cooperators53.”
From Cooperation without punishment (2023) · cites this paper as [53]
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- Authors
- Rand, D. G., Dreber, A., Ellingsen, T., Fudenberg, D., & Nowak, M. A.
- Affiliations
- Harvard University (US)
- Stockholm School of Economics (SE)
- Corresponding author
- Rand, David G.
- Dreber, Anna
- Nowak, Martin A.
- Venue
- Science
- Published
- 2009-09-04
- Volume
- 325
- Issue
- 5945
- Pages
- 1272-1275
- ISSN
- 0036-8075 (ISSN-L)
- 1095-9203
- PMC
- PMC2875121
- OpenAlex
- W2121067707
- Cited by
- 715
- References
- 41
- Citations by year
- 2026: 23 · 2025: 29 · 2024: 33 · 2023: 32 · 2022: 29 · 2021: 60 · 2020: 34 · 2019: 38 · 2018: 29 · 2017: 43 · 2016: 47 · 2015: 59 · 2014: 55 · 2013: 70 · 2012: 43
- FWCI
- 116.86
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Science (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) (Harvard University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- National Institute of General Medical Sciences (R01GM078986)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Management Science and Operations Research › Game Theory and Applications
- Keywords
- public goods game, cooperation, punishment, reward, repeated games, collective action, positive interactions, social identity, self-interested behavior
- MeSH terms
- Cooperative Behavior, Games, Experimental, Humans, Interpersonal Relations, Punishment, Reward
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