We study the evolution of cooperation in spatial public goods games with four competing strategies: cooperators, defectors, punishing cooperators, and punishing defectors. To explore the robustness of the cooperation-promoting effect of costly punishment, besides the usual strategy adoption...

We study the evolution of cooperation in spatial public goods games where, besides the classical strategies of cooperation (C) and defection (D), we consider punishing cooperators (PC) or punishing defectors (PD) as an additional strategy. Using a minimalist modeling approach, our goal is to...

We study the stability and welfare properties of merit-based (meritocratic) group-matching mechanisms in voluntary contribution games. Meritocratic matching in this context means that players tend to be assortatively grouped according to their contributions. We let regimes di ffer from one...

Many real-world mechanisms are “noisy” or “fuzzy”, that is the institutions in place to implement them operate with non-negligible degrees of imprecision and error. This observation raises the more general question of whether mechanisms that work in theory are also robust to more...

Voluntary contribution games are a classic social dilemma in which the individually dominant strategies result in a poor performance of the population. However, the negative zero-contribution predictions from these types of social dilemma situations give way to more positive (near-)efficient...