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Collective punishment is more effective than collective reward for promoting cooperation

Collective punishment and reward are usually regarded as two potential mechanisms to explain the evolution of cooperation. Both scenarios, however, seem problematic to understand cooperative behavior, because they can raise the second-order free-rider problem and many organisms are not able to discr...

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Autores principales: Gao, Lei, Wang, Zhen, Pansini, Riccardo, Li, Yao-Tang, Wang, Rui-Wu
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group 2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4669458/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26634907
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep17752
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author Gao, Lei
Wang, Zhen
Pansini, Riccardo
Li, Yao-Tang
Wang, Rui-Wu
author_facet Gao, Lei
Wang, Zhen
Pansini, Riccardo
Li, Yao-Tang
Wang, Rui-Wu
author_sort Gao, Lei
collection PubMed
description Collective punishment and reward are usually regarded as two potential mechanisms to explain the evolution of cooperation. Both scenarios, however, seem problematic to understand cooperative behavior, because they can raise the second-order free-rider problem and many organisms are not able to discriminate less cooperating individuals. Even though they have been proved to increase cooperation, there has been a debate about which one being more effective. To address this issue, we resort to the N-player evolutionary snowdrift game (NESG), where a collective punishment/reward mechanism is added by allowing some players to display punishment/reward towards all remaining players. By means of numerous simulations and analyses, we find that collective punishment is more effective in promoting cooperation for a relatively high initial frequency of cooperation or for a relatively small group. When the intensity of punishment exceeds a certain threshold, a stable state of full cooperation emerges for both small and large groups. In contrast, such state does not appear for large groups playing a NESG with reward mechanism. In the case of mutualistic interactions, finally, our results show the new payoff with collective punishment/reward can lead to the coexistence of cooperators and defectors when discrimination between these two is not possible.
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spelling pubmed-46694582015-12-09 Collective punishment is more effective than collective reward for promoting cooperation Gao, Lei Wang, Zhen Pansini, Riccardo Li, Yao-Tang Wang, Rui-Wu Sci Rep Article Collective punishment and reward are usually regarded as two potential mechanisms to explain the evolution of cooperation. Both scenarios, however, seem problematic to understand cooperative behavior, because they can raise the second-order free-rider problem and many organisms are not able to discriminate less cooperating individuals. Even though they have been proved to increase cooperation, there has been a debate about which one being more effective. To address this issue, we resort to the N-player evolutionary snowdrift game (NESG), where a collective punishment/reward mechanism is added by allowing some players to display punishment/reward towards all remaining players. By means of numerous simulations and analyses, we find that collective punishment is more effective in promoting cooperation for a relatively high initial frequency of cooperation or for a relatively small group. When the intensity of punishment exceeds a certain threshold, a stable state of full cooperation emerges for both small and large groups. In contrast, such state does not appear for large groups playing a NESG with reward mechanism. In the case of mutualistic interactions, finally, our results show the new payoff with collective punishment/reward can lead to the coexistence of cooperators and defectors when discrimination between these two is not possible. Nature Publishing Group 2015-12-04 /pmc/articles/PMC4669458/ /pubmed/26634907 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep17752 Text en Copyright © 2015, Macmillan Publishers Limited http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
spellingShingle Article
Gao, Lei
Wang, Zhen
Pansini, Riccardo
Li, Yao-Tang
Wang, Rui-Wu
Collective punishment is more effective than collective reward for promoting cooperation
title Collective punishment is more effective than collective reward for promoting cooperation
title_full Collective punishment is more effective than collective reward for promoting cooperation
title_fullStr Collective punishment is more effective than collective reward for promoting cooperation
title_full_unstemmed Collective punishment is more effective than collective reward for promoting cooperation
title_short Collective punishment is more effective than collective reward for promoting cooperation
title_sort collective punishment is more effective than collective reward for promoting cooperation
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4669458/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26634907
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep17752
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