The Evolution of Strong Reciprocity: Cooperation in Heterogeneous Populations
University of Siena Economics Working Paper No. 402
27 Pages Posted: 5 Jan 2004
Date Written: September 2003
Abstract
How do human groups maintain a high level of cooperation despite a low level of genetic relatedness among group members? We suggest that many humans have a predisposition to punish those who violate group-beneficial norms, even when this imposes a fitness cost on the punisher. Such altruistic punishment is widely observed to sustain high levels of cooperation in behavioral experiments and in natural settings. We offer a model of cooperation and punishment that we call strong reciprocity: where members of a group benefit from mutual adherence to a social norm, strong reciprocators obey the norm and punish its violators, even though as a result they receive lower payoffs than other group members, such as selfish agents who violate the norm and do not punish, and pure cooperators who adhere to the norm but free-ride by never punishing. Our agent-based simulations show that, under assumptions approximating likely human environments over the 100,000 years prior to the domestication of animals and plants, the proliferation of strong reciprocators when initially rare is highly likely, and that substantial frequencies of all three behavioral types can be sustained in a population. As a result, high levels of cooperation are sustained. Our results do not require that group members be related or that group extinctions occur.
Keywords: agent-based models, evolutionary games, cooperation, reciprocity, sociobiology
JEL Classification: C15, C72, H41, Z13
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
Fairness and Retaliation: The Economics of Reciprocity
By Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter
-
Fairness and Retaliation: The Economics of Reciprocity
By Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter
-
Cooperation and Punishment in Public Goods Experiments
By Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter
-
Social Norms and Welfare State Dynamics
By Assar Lindbeck, Sten Nyberg, ...
-
Wages, Profits and Rent-Sharing
By David G. Blanchflower, Andrew J. Oswald, ...
-
Does Unmeasured Ability Explain Inter-Industry Wage Differentials?
-
More Order with Less Law: On Contract Enforcement, Trust and Crowding
By Iris Bohnet, Bruno S. Frey, ...
-
The Behavioral Impact of Emotions in a Power-to-Take Game: An Experimental Study