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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
SOE 14: Evolutionary Game Theory (joint with BP and DY)
SOE 14.2: Talk
Tuesday, March 12, 2013, 15:15–15:30, H37
How `first carrot, then stick' incentives promote cooperation — •Tatsuya Sasaki1,2, Xiaojie Chen1, Åke Brännström3,1, and Ulf Dieckmann1 — 1International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria — 2University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria — 3University of Umeå, Umeå, Sweden
Social institutions often use rewards and penalties to promote cooperation. As providing such incentives tends to be costly, it is important to find efficient strategies for gauging positive and negative incentives as a situation demands. Most game-theoretical studies of cooperation have, however, modeled rewarding and punishing in isolation and by focusing on peer sanctioning, through which each player separately decides whether or not to sanction a co-player.
Here, we study how a sanctioning policy we call `first carrot, then stick' affects the evolution of cooperation in public good games. Assuming the existence of institutions that can provide incentives on a limited budget, we examine an adaptive sanctioning policy that switches the incentive from rewarding to punishing when defectors decrease below a certain frequency. We find that in well-mixed populations this policy is more efficient in promoting and maintaining full cooperation than either rewards or penalties alone. We also demonstrate that this finding extends to spatially structured populations. Such an institutional hybrid incentive with adaptive feedback is a simple yet unifying solution for encouraging cooperative behaviors.