Theoretical and empirical studies have generally weighed the effect of peer punishment and pool punishment for sanctioning free riders separately. However, these sanctioning mechanisms often pose a puzzling tradeoff between efficiency and stability in detecting and punishing free riders. Here,...

Peer punishment is widely lauded as a decentralized solution to the problem of social cooperation. However, experimental evidence of its effectiveness primarily stems from public good structures. This paper explores peer punishment in another structural setting: a system of generalized exchange....

Experiments using the public goods game have repeatedly shown that in cooperative social environments, punishment makes cooperation flourish, and withholding punishment makes cooperation collapse. In less cooperative social environments, where antisocial punishment has been detected, punishment...

Human cooperation, occurring without reciprocation and between unrelated individuals in large populations, represents an evolutionary puzzle. One potential explanation is that cooperative behaviour may be transmitted between individuals via social learning. Using an online social dilemma...

In this work, we explore the role of learning dynamics and social norms in human cooperation on networks. We study the model recently introduced in [Physical Review E, 97, 042321 (2018)] that integrates the well-studied Experience Weighted Attraction learning model with some features...

We formally explore the idea that punishment of norm-breakers may be a vehicle for the older generation to teach youngsters about social norms. We show that this signaling role provides sufficient incentives to sustain costly punishing behavior. People punish norm-breakers to pass information...

There is a large body of evidence showing that a substantial proportion of people cooperate in public goods games, even if the situation is one-shot and completely anonymous. In the present study, we bring together two major endogenous factors that are known to affect cooperation levels, and in...

Since social dilemmas among n-persons are often embedded in other types of social exchanges, the exclusion of defectors in social dilemmas from other exchanges functions as a costless selective incentive. Recently, such “linkage” has been considered as a promising solution to resolve the...

Mutation-generated variation in behavior is thought to promote the evolution of cooperation. Here, we study this by distinguishing two effects of mutation in evolutionary games of the finitely repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma in infinite asexual populations. First, we show how cooperation can...