Reputation and (anti-social) punishment sustain cooperation in the Optional Public Goods Game

The Institute of Economics will hold a webinar meeting as part of its Seminar Series on Tuesday, June 8, 2021: Simone Righi from the Ca' Foscari University of Venice will present the paper "Reputation and (anti-social) punishment sustain cooperation in the Optional Public Goods Game".

Abstract:

Cooperative behaviour has been extensively studied, in both evolutionary biology and the social sciences, as a choice between cooperation and defection. However, in many cases, the possibility to not participate or to exit a situation is also available. This type of problem can be studied through the optional public goods game. The introduction of the "Loner" strategy, allows players to withdraw from the public goods game, radically changing the dynamics of cooperation in social groups and leading to a never-ending cooperator-defector-loner cycle. While pro-social punishment has been found to help increase cooperation, anti-social punishment - where defectors punish cooperators - causes the downfall of cooperation in both experimental and theoretical studies. In this paper, the authors extend the theory of the optional public goods game,introducing reputational dynamics in the form of social norms that allow agents to condition both their participation and contribution decisions to the reputation of their peers. The authors benchmark this setup both with respect to the standard optional public goods game and to the variant where all types of punishment are allowed. We find that a social norm imposing a more moderate reputational penalty for opting out than for defecting, increases cooperation. When, besides reputation, punishment is also possible, the two mechanisms work synergically under all norms that do not punish loners too harshly. Under this latter setup, the high levels of cooperation are sustained by conditional strategies, which largely reduce the use of pro-social punishment and almost completely eliminate anti-social punishment.

All interested participants are welcome to join online at the following link. The event will be fully online. External participants need to contact the organisers via email to grant access to the seminar.