Freedom, enforcement, and the social dilemma of strong altruism

De Silva, Hannelore; Hauert, Christoph; Traulsen, Arne; Sigmund, Karl

doi:10.1007/s00191-009-0162-8

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Add to Basket

Release HistoryDetailsSummary

Released

Journal Article

Freedom, enforcement, and the social dilemma of strong altruism

MPS-Authors

/persons/resource/persons56973

Traulsen, Arne
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)

De_Silva_2010.pdf
(Publisher version), 368KB

Supplementary Material (public)

There is no public supplementary material available

Citation

De Silva, H., Hauert, C., Traulsen, A., & Sigmund, K. (2010). Freedom, enforcement, and the social dilemma of strong altruism. Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 20(2), 203-217. doi:10.1007/s00191-009-0162-8.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-000F-D49E-F

Abstract

Cooperation in joint enterprises poses a social dilemma. How can altruistic behavior be sustained if selfish alternatives provide a higher payoff? This social dilemma can be overcome by the threat of sanctions. But a sanctioning system is itself a public good and poses a second-order social dilemma. In this paper, we show by means of deterministic and stochastic evolutionary game theory that imitation-driven evolution can lead to the emergence of cooperation based on punishment, provided the participation in the joint enterprise is not compulsory. This surprising result—cooperation can be enforced if participation is voluntary—holds even in the case of ‘strong altruism’, when the benefits of a player’s contribution are reaped by the other participants only.