A Critical Analysis of Punishment in Public Goods Games
Social dilemmas arise whenever individuals must choose between their own self interests or the welfare of a group. Economic games such as Public Goods Games (PGG) provide a framework for studying human behavior in social dilemmas. Cooperators put their self interests aside for the group benefit while defectors free ride by putting their self interests first. Punishment has been shown to be an effective mechanism for countering free riding in both model based and human PGG experiments. But researchers always assume, since this punishment is costly to the punisher, it must be altruistic. In this study we show costly punishment in a PGG has nothing to do with altruism. Replicator dynamics are used to evolve strategies in a PGG. Our results show even a minority of punishers can improve cooperation levels in a population if the cooperators who punish are trustworthy. Finally, we argue punishment as a strategy in social dilemmas is never altruistic.
2018 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG)