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Increasing returns to scale: The solution to the second-order social dilemma
Hang Ye1,2, Shu Chen1, Jun Luo2
1College of Economics, Interdisciplinary Center for Social Sciences (ICSS), Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.
Scientific Reports
|August 19, 2016
Summary
Punishing free-riders can collapse cooperation, creating a social dilemma. This study shows that with increasing returns to scale, punishers can dominate, resolving this dilemma and promoting cooperation.
Area of Science:
- Evolutionary Game Theory
- Social Dilemmas
- Behavioral Economics
Background:
- Cooperation is essential for human societies, but free-riders pose a threat.
- Punishing free-riders resolves social dilemmas but incurs costs, creating a second-order dilemma.
- Existing solutions often require stringent assumptions.
Purpose of the Study:
- To propose a simple model of a public goods game with increasing returns to scale.
- To investigate conditions under which punishment can overcome the social dilemma.
- To explore the evolutionary basis of punishing behavior.
Main Methods:
- Modeling a public goods game with increasing returns to scale.
- Analyzing the conditions for the emergence and dominance of punishers.
- Examining historical and evolutionary evidence for cooperation and punishment.
Main Results:
- Punishers can dominate the population if increasing returns to scale are sufficiently large.
- A high degree of increasing returns to scale dissipates the second-order social dilemma.
- Historical examples of large-scale cooperation (e.g., prehistoric endeavors) exhibit high increasing returns.
Conclusions:
- Natural selection favors a tendency towards justice and punishment of norm defection.
- Increasing returns to scale provide a mechanism for the evolution of costly punishment.
- This model offers a solution to the social dilemma under mild conditions.
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