English
 
Help Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Released

Journal Article

Public goods with punishment and abstaining in finite and infinite populations

MPS-Authors
/persons/resource/persons56973

Traulsen,  Arne
Department Evolutionary Ecology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Max Planck Society;
Research Group Evolutionary Theory, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Max Planck Society;

External Resource
No external resources are shared
Fulltext (restricted access)
There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.
Fulltext (public)

Hauert_BT_2008.pdf
(Publisher version), 278KB

Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Hauert, C., Traulsen, A., De Silva née Brandt, H., Nowak, M. A., & Sigmund, K. (2008). Public goods with punishment and abstaining in finite and infinite populations. Biological Theory, 3(2), 114-122. doi:10.1162/biot.2008.3.2.114.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-000F-D709-3
Abstract
The evolution and maintenance of cooperation in human and animal societies challenge various disciplines ranging from evolutionary biology to anthropology, social sciences, and economics. In social interactions, cooperators increase the welfare of the group at some cost to themselves whereas defectors attempt to free ride and neither provide benefits nor incur costs. The problem of cooperation becomes even more pronounced when increasing the number of interacting individuals. Punishment and voluntary participation have been identified as possible factors to support cooperation and prevent cheating. Typically, punishment behavior is unable to gain a foothold in a population, while volunteering alone can efficiently prevent deadlocks in states of mutual defection but is unable to stabilize cooperation. The combined effects of the two mechanisms have surprisingly different consequences in finite and infinite populations. Here we provide a detailed comparison of the two scenarios and demonstrate that driven by the inherent stochasticity of finite populations, the possibility to abstain from social interactions plays a pivotal role, which paves the way for the establishment of cooperation and punishment.