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Punishment and Gossip: Sustaining Cooperation
in a Public Goods Game
Francesca Giardini 1 , Mario Paolucci 1 , Daniel Villatoro 2 ,andRosariaConte 1
1 ISTC-CNR, Roma, Italy
{ francesca.giardini,mario.paolucci,rosaria.conte } @istc.cnr.it
2 IIIA-CSIC, Barcelona, Spain
dvillatoro@iiia.csic.es
Abstract. In an environment in which free-riders are better off than
cooperators, social control is required to foster and maintain coopera-
tion. There are two main paths through which social control can be ap-
plied: punishment and reputation. Our experiments explore the e cacy
of punishment and reputation on cooperation rates, both in isolation
and in combination. Using a Public Goods Game, we are interested in
assessing how cooperation rates change when agents can play one of two
different reactive strategies, i.e., they can pay a cost in order to reduce
the payoff of free-riders, or they can know others' reputation and then
either play defect with free-riders, or refuse to interact with them. Co-
operation is maintained at a high level through punishment, but also
reputation-based partner selection proves effective in maintaining coop-
eration. However, when agents are informed about free-riders' reputation
and play Defect, cooperation decreases. Finally, a combination of punish-
ment and reputation-based partner selection leads to higher cooperation
rates.
Keywords: Reputation, Punishment, Agent-based simulation, Social
Control, Public Goods Game.
1
Introduction
Social control is an emergent social phenomenon, which allows the costs of pro-
social behavior to be redistributed over a population in which cooperators live
side-by-side with non-cooperators. Some specific phenomena are usually sub-
sumed under the large heading of social control, including ostracism [3,15] and
altruistic punishment. The latter is defined as a costly aggression inflicted to
cheaters by members of the group who did not necessarily undergo attacks from
the punished, nor get direct benefits out of the sanction applied [9]. According to
strong reciprocity theory, the presence of individuals who altruistically reward
cooperative acts and punish norm violating behavior at a cost to themselves
sustains cooperation and promotes social order [11]. However, the act of pun-
ishment results in an immediate reduction of welfare both for the punisher and
for the punished individual, thus posing several problems, like eciency [27,7],
and the risk of counter-aggression [19].
 
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