The impact of punishment on cooperative decision-making and wealth in an alternative strategy update model

Bandyopadhyay, Soham (2021) The impact of punishment on cooperative decision-making and wealth in an alternative strategy update model. Masters thesis, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata.

Text (MS Dissertation of Soham Bandyopadhyay (16MS182) 16MS182_Thesis_file.pdf - Submitted Version Restricted to Repository staff only Download (4MB)

Abstract

Human societies are built on the contributions of individuals to public goods - a manifestation of the remarkable propensity that humans display for cooperative behaviour that eschews individual profit in favour of collective welfare. A large number of studies over the years have attempted to identify the factors and mechanisms responsible for such cooperative behaviour, in order to better understand how cooperation evolved and is sustained in human populations. Models of human cooperation based in evolutionary game theory have traditionally employed pairwise comparison-based rules of strategy update to simulate human behaviour – however, such rules do not accurately reflect how humans behave in real-life empirical experiments. Indeed, recent studies have revealed that the cooperative decision-making process in humans is much more complex than previously thought, and is influenced by factors like wealth and resource inequality, behaviour of neighbouring individuals, and periodic rewiring of social ties. Altruistic punishment of selfish behaviour by cooperators is another important phenomenon that has been identified as being responsible for promoting cooperative behaviour in human populations – studies have found that such punishment is frequent when allowed, causing cooperation levels to go up and wealth inequality to decrease. This study explores the extent to which punishment influences cooperative behaviour and wealth inequality in both static and dynamic populations, and the mechanisms by which it acts. This is done through the incorporation of altruistic punishment into a model of human cooperative behaviour, featuring a structured population of players playing a Public Goods Game over successive rounds, where players decide whether to cooperate or defect based on cues taken from their respective wealth and strategy environments. The results show that while the impact of punishment on the modelled population is significant, it does not accurately reflect punishment-induced changes observed in empirical studies. It is therefore concluded that while cooperative behaviour in the absence of punishment is dictated by the wealth and strategy environments of individual players, additional factors come into play when punishment is introduced into the population – and these factors would need to be identified and isolated in order to gain a proper understanding of human cooperative behaviour in the real world.

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