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Freedom, enforcement, and the social dilemma of strong altruism

Cooperation in joint enterprises poses a social dilemma. How can altruistic behavior be sustained if selfish alternatives provide a higher payoff? This social dilemma can be overcome by the threat of sanctions. But a sanctioning system is itself a public good and poses a second-order social dilemma. In this paper, we show by means of deterministic and stochastic evolutionary game theory that imitation-driven evolution can lead to the emergence of cooperation based on punishment, provided the participation in the joint enterprise is not compulsory. This surprising result - cooperation can be enforced if participation is voluntary - holds even in the case of 'strong altruism', when the benefits of a player's contribution are reaped by the other participants only. (authors' abstract)

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:VIENNA/oai:epub.wu-wien.ac.at:5149
Date04 1900
CreatorsDe Silva, Hannelore, Hauert, Christoph, Traulsen, Arne, Sigmund, Karl
PublisherSpringer Berlin Heidelberg
Source SetsWirtschaftsuniversität Wien
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeArticle, PeerReviewed
Formatapplication/pdf
RightsCreative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Relationhttp://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00191-009-0162-8, http://link.springer.com/journal/191, http://www.springer.com/de/open-access/springer-open-choice, http://epub.wu.ac.at/5149/

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